In the mid-1970s, neighbor kids would come to our house to ask our children if they wanted to play "Super-friends." Each wanted to take the part of their favorite superhero – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman striking out to save the world from evil.

   In the early 1950s, I wrapped the ends of a towel around my neck and, for a few moments, thought I might fly. My disappointment at the lack of lift-off was palpable. But the lift-off I got from friends proved genuine.

      Our fascination with relationships comes early.  If we commit, some of our acquaintances will become sacred-friends, the handful of people to whom we bare our hearts.

   "I know the way you can get/ When you have not had a drink of love…" Hafiz wrote.

   It is not super-friends, but sacred-friends who lift Love's most precious brew to our lips.

   We may also experience a sip of Love from unexpected wells. From the stranger with whom we have a kind exchange. Or from loving encounters with the woods.

   "Something's wrong for these deer to trust us," Stephen Dunn wrote in his poem "This Far Out in the Country."

   "It's murderous/ almost everywhere, and their herd/ is too large and, besides, someone always/ has a reason."

   I left Death Row Sunday morning with an unusually heavy heart – the price of compassion. By its nature, "It's murderous" in there and its dark energy often enshrouds my heart for hours after the last of the eight gates slams behind me. 

   But, of course, we are all on Death Row. The question is: How will we live?

   "I woke this morning from a dream," Dunn writes, "in which my grandparents were holding hands/ in uneventful moonlight,/ city people in a field so large/ they appeared lost, though they didn't/ seem to care." 

   Why bother with fear? "Perhaps this far out/ in the country," Dunn continues, "there's a precinct of the charmed." 

   In such a Love-wrapped "precinct" we need never worry about being lost. Beyond (or within) the dim air of the prison or the operating room, Love's light lives. 

   Perhaps, we can never find the "The Beloved Community" Martin Luther King dreamed. Yet, we may embrace each other as Love's children. Even through virtual villages like the Journal. 

   We can create our own beloved community of sacred-friends, our own "precinct of the charmed." We may already have this in our family: spouses, children, siblings, parents. Can we enrich our experience by bringing more of us to them?

   Sacred eyes reveal a deeper love in one we already know. If we approach others with such eyes, we will find other friends who become holy to us and us to them.

   Love can only be found with Love. 

   There is someone who already lives sun-haloed before us. Someone who will dance with us even on our darkest days and crown our lives with light. Do we see?

– Reverend Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Sun-haloed Model – Study #2" copyright Erie Chapman 2011