The King of Hearts

                                                                               

God can love so well and so long, He can love forevermore because He is forever. Out of God’s lips no one will ever hear: well, I wasted 10 years of my life loving this person…Because God’s life has no end, He is not limited. We have been tainted by the little years of life we have, and during those few years have to do it right. 10 years or more is too much to waste, 1 maybe too much to waste. We have been scared by our limits and uncertainties…


And this is what took me to seek for something bigger as a teenager. I rebelled against my parents and against all adults. I rebelled against the formal types and the hippies too. All of them with no exceptions were a failure in my eyes. They seemed so loveless and joyless to me. They never enjoyed anything. They never enjoyed the money they worked so hard for. They were incapable of loving the person they vowed to love. Much of their love ended in hate and the children they produced among loving words and whispers of passion, were also barely loved…one resemblance of traits they didn’t care for …love could cool…

I vowed to never be like them. I vowed to do everything differently. But I too without even knowing was already becoming one of them. Too busy dating and trying to find a school that could hold me trough the uncertainties of Brazil’s economic situation in the 80s. My life was already shrinking around myself.

I wondered about love…how can someone for their entire lives just love the 4 or 5 in their households and then barely…in my juvenile eyes even the love they dedicated to their parents was a love undressed of joy. It was more like an “obligated too, irritated by you, love I still give”

I vowed to never ever follow failed models, my own models and the general public models given to us through history. But before I knew I was thinking of baby names and though I did everything opposite to what they did, and though I vowed to love more and love better and love further and love harder and to love longer, and to also love in numbers and quality, I too failed. I knew that…I knew that I too didn’t know how to love, didn’t know if I truly loved who I once claimed too and now really seemed to hate…

I laughed at myself and wondered if there was a guide a step by step guide on how to really, for real give substantial love. Something like an Idiots Guide to Real Love. I needed one soon. I imagined that my parents like myself were too caught in this rebelling against their parents when they were young, but their parents also had no fault, no clue. We all rebel against becoming another failed model. But no good model was available to my knowledge.

Yes there were songs of love, of broken hearted people with cheating lovers, of happy people in love, of immigrants missing the nation they so much loved. But in my eyes this too was limiting stuff…how can you only love your lover, your country, your children? This tiny life seemed like a waste of time. Mine was one unexpecting life. Weak models of love, fiery words of passion that usually ended in a cold or bored bed. Really foolish and pointless. Love that ends in hate, passion that ends without compassion, usually in bitterness. The love of humans is not what I admired, but there was no escaping.
Then my “Idiot’s Guide to Love” came through one day.

1000000000000000000000000000 to the N to the N to the N to the N and N volts incomparable to it…a Light that could fill all the dark holes of the universe known and unknown. A warmth that expressed Everything, everything that is safe and good, and life and purpose, and L O V E real love gentle and pure and exciting so much like my first bike ride on my own, and the summers of my childhood, and grandma’s Aracy “cozido” with bananas and corn and the rice to go along, and like her cuscus too, and like the first time I’ve seen puppies and held one, like seeing grandma Julia beautifying herself with a dab of perfume a hat and pearls, like looking at my mom’s closet and wondering at all the silks and scarves and chains and heels…would I ever measure up to her model of lady and mom?

…a new Universe was before me, just like when in Buzios we saw all the baby fish in the seashore by the millions…like when you’re confronted with so much life and the helplessness of the possibility of the loss of it all…like when they handled Ceu to me, wet with blood and placenta and I was so mesmerized and afraid that she would slip from my arms and die on her very first day of life…so I draped her in my hospital gown but never felt safe since that day, just like when the kitchen starts to fill the whole house with the smell of cake and you know at any minute now pleasure is near, like the smell of the earth just before a heavy rain, like the humming of bees by the Jaboticaba trees and you know even the worst humming wont keep you away…I was before a new Universe.

One that would take me by the hand step by step. A Christ in me, me in Him. A Christ to save me from my unexpeting life. A Christ to save me from when life turns 40 or 60 or more years of death. A Christ to expand my borders my love limits my love knowledge. A Christ to save me from my ugly criminal self, my unloving heart.

My Idiots Guide to Love came in the form of a deformed person, a man hanging on a cross…Is it even possible, love like this? Love that can give it all endlessly and hopefully.

Is it possible, to kill Death and Hate and Hell by dying? My heart trembles and makes my whole body shake…

I was before a new Universe…the love I so much searched and doubted and questioned and wondered for, was here, in the form of what was left from a man hanging on this cross wet and covered by His own blood…Somehow I thought of Jan 1st my baby, wet, spotted by my own blood…it is funny how our minds react to when the Truth is finally put before us… Love like this made me feel so small, so small that I wished to disappear, to vanish for sometime or forever in my tremendous smallness…

A Christ to save me from much more than I even knew I needed saving, I knew nothing of hell and nothing of my own sinful condition, I knew nothing even of the condemnation hanging over my head, my days counted…

How foolish. I knew nothing of my final destination. The most unloving and fickle people I knew in earth seemed like merciful angels before what exists in hell…how common and unkind of me to always be criticizing people.

I never even knew I was coming to Him looking for the perfect Love and found perfect Eternal Life, an escape from hell…

I was lucky or better yet Blessed, I was before a whole and Holy new Universe ruled by the King of Heaven, the King of Real Hearts the King of Eternity, the King of Love and Charity, Eternally Strong and Just and Whole and Perfect, the King of me.