And so we come to the final week of Advent – the week where the focus is love. It seems appropriate that this week happens at the time where we are catapulted into the chaos of family and high stakes festivities. Where expectations and needs and understandings of reality clash and clang like swords in combat. Where love seems anything but simple.

Due to a dastardly case of covid, my family will be celebrating Christmas almost a week late this year. For the first time in my life I didn’t spend Christmas day with my parents. We didn’t do our Christmas traditions. And the pain and requirements and expectations and needs associated with that loss chucked up a whole new set of questions about what love looks like for me. In real life, love seems a lot messier than on Christmas cards.

I think I have been dreading the week where the focus is on love because, the older I get, the more I realise I don’t really do it as well as I thought. ‘Love’ is something we talk about constantly. We use the word (especially if we are a female millennial) almost incessantly. And there are many examples of ‘love’ in our world. What a mother holds for her child is certainly love. So is the feeling the child has towards her mother. And yet how many mothers are truly whole enough to love in ways that leave no scars? How many children have a love where they are not the centrifugal force about which their parents turn? And then there’s romantic love, which is surely the icing on the cake, and yet, once you start digging a bit deeper, I often wonder how many of us confuse ‘being in love’ with the feeling of being loved ourselves.

There is a phenomenon, that my husband likes to dryly remind me of, in which your confidence in your own authority on a topic decreases in inverse proportion to your actual expertise on the matter. It happens because the more you know, the more you realise there is to know. I think it’s a bit like that with love. I think, the more I learn about the human heart (and the more I learn about my heart, in particular), the more I see I need to learn. Although I was lucky enough to be brought up in a family where I was loved and have friends who loved me and marry a man who loves me faithfully, my heart has managed to become wounded and broken and separated from love in so many many ways. And sometimes, when I look at God, I feel no love at all.

God says they are ‘love’. I have to admit that I honestly do not know what this means. The concept of continuous and joyous self-emptying being the very nature of the godhead fascinates me – and is one that I find very difficult to grasp. If the very nature of God is self-emptying goodness, then why this mess? Why doesn’t she/he do what is screamingly self-evident to any human who looks upon the brokenness around us? Or is the answer truly in the holiday we are celebrating? How does a baby in a manger fix all of this?

It would be dishonest to say I haven’t felt a sense of God’s love at all, though. I have had moments of feeling it – like sunshine on my back. It’s not like something you see fully in front of you – more like a diamond that you can only see one face of at a time. I’ve felt moments of it – of unexpected affection or delight. Moments of release and exultation. I’ve felt peace and a sense of being front and centre of their gaze. And yet those moments seem to be the exception, not the rule. My heart quickly retreats into its self-imposed prison – of bitterness and lowered expectations, of unforgiveness and victimhood, of disappointment and self-protective grasping.

I think I’m more likely to have felt God’s love through people who seem to know them. These are the people who make me think that God must be alright and, if I could only know the Jesus they know, I would truly love him. I’ve experienced a lot of love through people these past two years. Love will sit and listen to my pain. Love will fast with me. Love will forgo eating carbs when he is around me. Love will hold my hand at every single appointment. Or pay for a hot air balloon ride for me. Love will offer to have my baby for me, even if she doesn’t yet know what that really entails. Love will walk in my front door and empty my dishwasher. Again. Love will say ‘it’s OK’ when I arrive late for a catch up. Again. Love will offer me their beach house. Love will go surfing with me, just to let me feel the joy of the waves. Love will come and mow my lawn and start digging out the dandelions. Love will pick up the phone. Again.

There has been a lot of commentary on the insufficiency of the English word for ‘love’ and the various types of love. I suspect that there are more than four or ten or twenty different types of love. Perhaps ‘love’ is more like the concept of ‘colour’ – and there are a hundred thousand different variations and intensities and flavours, but it saturates everything and everything is flavoured by the love soaking into it. Or maybe love is more like the light that bounces off the colours – revealing the true nature of the objects and textures in the world – the requirement for everything to be.

The more I learn about it, the more I realise my heart is dry and thirsty, and perhaps hasn’t given away as much of it as I think. Perhaps learning to love is like learning to speak, and we are all infants who are still babbling. Perhaps this is OK – the babbling stage being an important one as we slowly learn to use our vocal chords and eventually progress to using one or two words.

Here I am, drawn away again to the sea, sitting on a blustery coastal beach, watching a pod of young surfers.

Ignoring the signs declaring ‘dangerous beach’ and prohibiting swimming due to ‘strong currents’, they gaggle delightedly down the stairs, throwing clothes to the side and jumping into their wetsuits. Full of the yelp and bluster of being fourteen, they sprint haphazardly towards the beach – hardly able to contain their joy, their hunger, for the ocean. They gallop and canter across the sand, pausing at an obliging sandhill to try their hand at surfing down the dune. Carelessly, they throw their bodies and boards down the cliff of sand, again and again and even again – tussling like puppies at play.

Suddenly, one of them tires of the sandhill and turns towards the sea. The others instinctively follow. Running gleefully towards the rip, they throw themselves into it, one after another after another. They fight against the tide to get into the deep, paddling with frantic excitement into the mouth of the churning maelstrom. SMASH! They feel the majesty of the ocean, sense its awesome power. Exhilarated, they fling themselves into its chaos.

Bobbing up and down, they respond with long-practised skill to each wave as it comes. The glassy blue speedhumps, they allow themselves to slide over. Occasionally, with the small crests of foam, they let themselves be picked up and tossed lightly backwards. And then the massive fists of ocean power roar right up to them. I watch, breathless as, kneeling on their boards, they arch their backs like little black caterpillars and plunge their heads beneath the breaking foam. My heart skips a beat as they are lost in the swirling torrent. Then, a long second later, they rise – almost balletically – like the little Mermaid on the rock, before shaking the water vigorously from their salty manes.

And they keep riding the rip out, deeper and deeper, til they get to the place where the really big waves are crashing – the ones whose roar and thunder sends pulses of fear and awe through my body, even as I sit safely on the shore. And then, somehow, in the heartbeat of a second, they have turned on their boards, and I gasp as I realise they are hoping to catch this one – to fling themselves completely at its mercy.

There is a moment when they are shrouded in a blizzard of crashing whiteness. The arc and body of the waves completely covers them, and I think they’re lost in its terrifying, seething, mass. But then, they emerge, a tiny black dot amidst the snowstorm of spray, hurtling forward with all the speed and majesty of the ocean. Completely surrendered to its power. Pulsing forward.

And I wonder at the strange wisdom that these reckless kids have found. The wisdom of knowing how not to fight the ocean. Of accepting, even embracing their smallness. The wisdom of becoming immersed, submitting themselves to each peak and trough, each wipeout. The strange interplay between agency and surrender. The acceptance of the ocean’s uncontrollability – even the delight in it. How they dance so playfully when they are so completely beyond their depth, in the midst of something they absolutely cannot control.