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Give the gift that keeps on giving -- Love
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"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. " Mother Teresa
As Christmas quickly approaches, and I acknowledge that I have not yet made time for decorating or shopping, I am still glad that I made time for one thing - singing with the parish choir.
For our choir in particular, practice for Christmas begins in September because we gift our parish with a concert each year which takes much preparation. Once Advent is here our cars can be seen in the parish parking lot sometimes three times a week, often for hours at a time. But we don't complain because we love to sing and we love our director, Jim, and we love our parish.
This year Jim gave us a wonderful Christmas gift. He arranged for us to sing at two local nursing homes and the veteran's home. Our first night out we were wonderfully received by the residents of the McCarrick Care Center, who joined in the singing and accompanied us with jingle bells.
At the close of our concert a resident remarked to her nurse, "Well, that was worth staying up for!"
After we finished laughing with delight we all agreed it was one of the best compliments we had ever received.
Our visit to the veterans' home brought with it some humbling moments. Here, as our director's fingers flew gloriously over the keys of the grand piano and we deftly flipped pages of music while singing four part harmonies, we were confronted with a veteran who apologized to us for not applauding because only his right hand had movement; we were touched by men and women who couldn't hold back the tears when we sang God Bless America - still in love with a country for which they had fought and served and some forever wounded in the process.
At all three concerts we sang gratefully to a room full of wheelchair bound adults, once lively, robust contributors to life now prisoners in their own bodies, and yet they found reason to applaud our simple gift of song, the gift of our presence - one of the few things of any value which we could give them.
But when we thought about it, it wasn't us giving them the gift, it was them giving us a gift that we so often toss aside - an awareness of blessing, an opportunity to have the curtain of our own shallowness drawn aside; to be reintroduced to what is really important - the human heart.
As members of a small parish choir we could do nothing to relieve the physical pain or limitations faced by those for whom we sang, but their gratitude was as genuine as if we had lifted them from their wheelchairs if only for a moment. Perhaps that is the effect of love.
Dr. Karl Menninger, a prominent psychologist during the 1930s believed it to be so. He wrote: "Love cures people--both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it." Christmas this year is bound to be difficult for anyone who has found themselves to be touched by the tragedies and painful uncertainties of life - and that would be many of us I'm sure.
But perhaps part of our cure for an encroaching despair of heart will be the extent to which we reach out with love.
It's a gift that never gets returned to the store.
______________________________________
Mary Morrell is the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers.
Contact
Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org
NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562-1990
mreginam@aol.com
Keywords
love
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