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If you’ve ever had a hearing test, then you’ve experienced the anticipation of something very subtle. In these tests, tones are played in each ear and when we hear them we acknowledge it. Very few of us hear all the tones. It may be that the tone is outside our ability to hear, and in such cases our anticipation is primed and waiting. Outside of this test, these tones would almost never catch our attention.

Deep, meaningful, eternal love is like this. Our attention must be primed and our anticipation awakened to it, because this kind of love is equally subtle. Deep love lives immediately below the surface experience. Once we perceive it, we can condition ourselves to live in a posture that will keep us alert and waiting for our Beloved.

Our first step is to desire this deep hidden love enough to pause. Finding a moment of stillness can be challenging when each of our schedules have been highjacked from our normal routines. Many of us are off work but some are working double. Travel schedules of family coming in or going out, along with all the arrangements become inflexible time barriers. Shopping for gifts, extra food, and all the little things locate us in environments that are congested and crowded, causing us to lose more time and often our patience.

I invite you to contemplate all the flurry of activity that is so frustrating during this time. Pull back and be still. Watch. Observe. Take your focus off that “one thing you need to get” and realize you are not “IN” the crowd, but you “ARE” the crowd. All comers possess a mental image (non-physical reality) or Word for the object they seek. In anticipation each has come to get it, and go to prepare it. We are part of it, and behind it lies our deeper motivation. It is this motivation that will become our reality, and to the observant, this motivation is actually visible…palpable…perceptible…in the moment of stillness.

This is the inflection point where we can become love to others.

The busier the agenda, the more baking, preparing, transporting, attending we have to do, the more vital it is we take our stillness and watchfulness and join or “be with” what is next. The tones of deep love are subtle but densely packed into each thing. As you observe this love in a gesture, or the effort of another, call it out, acknowledge it, thank them, check in on them. This present awareness, will awaken your beloved to the subtle tonality of deep love, and now there will be two you who perceive.

There comes a time when the food is consumed, the kitchen and house are a mess, the surprises are past, and the silence and sobriety sets back in. Be still and contemplate the tones within this moment and watch. Watch what emerges in yourself and in others. The depth of love is a sober contrast to the hours before. It’s a naked, vulnerable, melancholy tone. Love is so proximate to this turning point, I don’t want you to miss it. Before you begin cleaning, before your mind wanders off into what is next, before you start dreading having to work, or starting the year over, or how you’ll spend your remaining days off, “sit in and be with” this sad, quasi-disappointed, malaise of disconnected love. Do not diminish the dynamic range of love. Do not turn on it and say it’s gone. Do not forsake it. Just recognize that its appearance has only been what each person was conscious to bring, and that includes you and me. If we desire a deeper love, then we must each cultivate it immediately, and build intentionally upon it from this day forward...or it will escape us.

Love is everywhere. Like the tiny tones in a hearing test. We each have the capacity to turn up the volume as we gain skill in stillness and being, and lean into the punctuated moments when we are most awake. Yes, love is imperfect when passing through broken humanity, but our capacity to bear and bring love only expands with exposure and grace. As we survey our distracted, disoriented and disappointed world, certainly we can appreciate as Christ does, that “we know not what we do.” Love sees us as the children we are in our inability to understand, our preoccupations with stuff and things, and despite these flaws and failings, love allows us to receive, even in our diminished capacity, its depth dimension where a single tone becomes a beautiful song once combined with the note that each one of us brings.

May you find deep love as it finds you this season…it’s always right below the surface…so we never have to go without it again.