A LATE SUMMER REQUEST FOR BLESSINGS

Apprenticeship to Love: August 26, 2025

• Today’s questions: How am I the guardian of the solitude of the one I love? How am I the guardian of my own, necessary solitude?
• Today's practice: Against the demands and the pleasures of the day, carve out five minutes to be alone, in silence. Set a timer for five minutes and allow yourself to feel how beautiful it is. Allow yourself to feel how uncomfortable it is. Feel how much patience is required, just to be alone with yourself for five minutes.
  Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

I am today asked to give my blessings. A young couple is about to embark on a journey into matrimony, the condition of mothering. She, to be wife and mother. He, to be husband and father. Over the next few days they will cross literal and figurative distances and thresholds. What blessings can I give?

...

I am flattered to be asked. It is my nature, the way this twig has grown, to seek, always the light of others' affections, kindnesses, and requests for wisdom. Be careful, I tell myself. This thing they ask of you, it is real. Powerful. Don't get lost in the gassing off that is one of your favourite pleasures...

...

Let me begin to be serious here: What is meant by "blessing?" What might this couple be expecting or wanting —or needing? All separate and different things.

A teacher who provokes and inspires me, Stephen Jenkinson, is keen to dig into the pre-history of the things we do, as if by second nature. He encourages us to look to our own pre-history, the story before the story we're told, to divine truths that our stories occlude. Where to find this pre-history? In words. Fairy tales. Myths and legends. We know their magic as children. As we age into the culture we are slowly weaned from magic of any kind. We become rational, and too often, flat characters in a flattened world.

Our bodies, however, are not so easily flattened. The persistence of fairy tale truths, not just in the tropes of popular media (the Disney princess tropes, for example), but in the ceremonies and rituals that remain in the culture is an example. Imagine our weddings, without fairy tales to inspire them.

For those of us with Saxon roots, like this couple and me, the urgeschichte of blessings lies in sacrifice. In blood. Transformation by ordeal that involved some kind of figurative death, if not literal death. I like the notion caught in this word, urgeschichte. The "before-story." What we knew before modern knowing rationalized and flattened the knowing. Left it bloodless.

...

My capacity to offer blessings is born of my having been transformed. Having had skin in the game, and lost a good deal of it. Having been bloodied, wounded. Broken. And, recovered enough to warn against taking some things lightly. Like marriage. Like parenthood.

I have been foolish. Perhaps I can offer a blessing that will help protect against foolishness? It is unlikely. We all need to experience our capacity to be foolish. But, still, perhaps there is something I can offer against the worst of foolishness.

With that caveat I offer two words as blessings: solitude, and patience. I will also offer a set of instructions for their journey. These may make my blessings less abstract as they will infuse blood and excrement into the rituals and ceremony of the wedding and the birth that will come. There are no guarantees.

...

Solitude. Patience.

In the midst of our journeys, and in the company of our fellowship, our community, I invite you, dear reader, to consider solitude, and its helpmate, patience. How do these buttress each other? How do they make life in community an experience of flourishing, rather than stagnation?

I knew, at a very young age that solitude was important to me. It wasn't a conscious knowing, but instinctual. A real need. To be on my own.

Like so many of my real needs, I did not know how to be gentle with it. I didn't know how to honour it.

At the same time, I didn't know how to honour its complementary need: to be with others, and especially the desire to be in romantic and sexual companionship.

I'm not sure I know that now. But, today I am aware of these things. Conscious of how important they are to me, my relationships with others.

I offer solitude as a blessing to this couple, and if they accept this offering, then I ask them also to accept that my reverence for solitude has come at a price. It has cost me to know this. It has also cost the ones I've loved, and the ones I love. I had to learn that my solitude was more important than the attention and affection and approval I've spent my life chasing.

My advice, my encouragement: Learn how to be in solitude. Learn how to safeguard the solitude of the ones you love.

How to do this? I know it's important. With no doubts. But I have yet to see anyone learn this lesson gracefully, without the blood of expectations, and conditions and often marriage and family being spilled. Still, I know it is worth the price. Without it, I'm not sure there's anything worth calling love or marriage.

...

And now to the offering of patience.

Commitment is a wonderful and favourite word. It's something I hold dear. But commitment is just a word, an abstraction in the chaos of love and life. To make it a thing of flesh and blood and excrement requires one real thing: patience.

To become comfortable with the necessary solitude of the state of matrimony (mothering, supported by husbandry and fathering), will take one thing only: patience. The tests of life are real. They become sharper and less forgiving in the state of matrimony. The stakes are higher. Our fantasies, personal and cultural, of marriage and family become flesh and blood and yes, excrement. Almost none of this is beautiful. Except the enduring of it.

In the midst of marriage there is a deep tug to collapse. The culture that we are born into, you and I, tells us that the fairy tale of "happily forever" is nonsense. The rational world, and the world of romance-driven too-soon-unions and their corollary, the world of lawyers and pre-nuptial agreements and divorce and custody battles, ensures that it is nonsensical to remember the urgeschichte of marriage. As a child we know it is real. But that gets squeezed out of us. Yet, for some reason, as adults we continue to take the gamble. With this wedding, with this child, we might beat the odds. Perhaps the fairy tale will be a little bit real. Just maybe. A little bit, even. Rings on our fingers, and those fingers crossed, we jump the broom, cross the threshold into the unknown.

...

I will tell you, unequivocally: It is real.

This willingness to trust in my childhood fantasy is real. But is a magic that I will only know if I am are patient, and if I allow myself the solitude to be transformed. To be changed. To become the man I am.

I repeat: The fairy tales are the before-knowing, the urgeschichte of something deeper than rational understanding. Whatever resonates in those tales, I will let it sing, out loud. I will feel it in my ribcage beating, its the 3/4 time heart-knowing of how to be who I am on this journey, on this threshold.

...

The gifts she brings to me are unimaginable. The longer I love her, the more still I become, the more I allow my solitude —and hers— to be the way we need to be, the more patience I am required to be.

On my path, my journey, I am alone, yet in fellowship with others. I am a solitary traveller, but I am together with others. She is chief among these. Becoming still, I begin to feel her endlessly changing flow of being.

...

I was riding my bicycle yesterday in the summer evening. I remembered the sweet, sweet feeling of being in love. An overwhelming sweetness.

I used to think I needed someone to love me, for that feeling to be real. Now, I know better.

Now, I am beginning to know that the sweetness is my own willingness to feel all of her flow, and all the ways that she is. This willingness has nothing to do with the things I think I want. It has to do with being patient. Alone enough, quiet enough, that all things flow to me and through me. Only then is that sweetness the only experience I know.

CHAT

If you have thoughts about these offerings to an about-to-be-married couple, please join me on the Apprenticeship to Love chat group on Signal at https://signal.group/#CjQKIPbfC01rTfBN7f8peArlP_VtY3q8aK2uchw4kmlTLlZCEhDKe0nFRfMoRDapdf3hAB7V

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.
...once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

🌀Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita, 2:47)

🌀You must take the next step (that is why your leg hurts). (My beloved, my Oracle and my Siren, my Muse)