If there’s one thing that I’ve learned this summer, it’s a deeper appreciation for the difficulty of translating ideals into reality, plans into action, the exciting and imaginative conceptual into imperfect and everyday concrete.

I think of the lines T.S. Eliot penned in “The Hollow Men,” chilling but all-too-true:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And so I’ve been reflecting on the last two months, trying to discern where the shadow fell, and why.

I think that my capacity to dream -to hope- is greater than my capacity to enact, greater than my capacity for the elements that form the foundation for action: persistence, patience, faith, sacrifice, love…

And I think that to some degree my hope itself has been mis-founded, resting more on an overconfident estimation of my own ability than on Christ’s ability to form me as his disciple, that process I so frequently resist, that life-long journey I wish could be done in a moment. One day there may be such a moment, a “twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51, 52), but that day is not now, and I remain myself, imperfect and needy for the outstretched arm, the loving rebuke, the spirit of the cross: that mundane, everyday sort of resurrection. In short, needy for the wiser guidance of real love amidst all my dreams of heroism.

That is why one section from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” has stuck in my head all summer. A woman comes to the Elder Zosima wanting to know how to resolve her doubts about God and life after death, and he tells her that the only real remedy is the “experience of active love”. She responds that she often dreams about living a life of selfless love but soon realizes that “if there’s anything that would immediately cool my ‘active’ love for mankind, that one thing is ingratitude. In short, I work for pay and demand my pay at once, that is, praise and a return of love for my love.”

From the elder’s reply: “I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor… ‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days… In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me…”

In his conclusion, the elder elaborates on the difference between “active love” and “love in dreams”: “…active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”

Suffice it to say, there was certainly some hubris involved when I sat down at the beginning of this summer and committed to, among other things, sharing one meal a week with a homeless person.

This did not happen.

Out of the nine weeks I spent at home, eight of them contained no meals whatsoever with anyone who could be called homeless.

Love in dreams indeed.

Yet, during my last week at home, I did have one meal with a homeless couple.

I can no longer call them homeless though, because I now know their names: Timothy and Mary, who live in the underpass five minutes from my house.

(To be continued…)