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Peace comes in surrendering our memories to God
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"The Lord is faithful to all his promises and loving toward all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing." Psalm 145:13b-16
Memories are amazing things. They are moments that have the power to transform who we are into who we were meant to be, or they may become pieces of time that serve as obstacles to our fulfillment.
Last week as I was moving some things around on my desk at home I came across an old audio tape. Written across the cover were the words, "Be my love..." In that instant I was flooded with childhood memories of my mother singing in the kitchen. My mother loved opera and musicals and, most of all, my mother loved the voice of Mario Lanza. There were many nights when I fell asleep as his beautiful voice swelled from the kitchen radio and filled our small house. She knew the lyrics to all the songs he sang, but one in particular had found a place in her heart -- "Be my love for no one else can end this yearning, this need that you and you alone create . . ."
Sometimes, when I would hear the moving melody of that song begin I would sneak out of bed and tiptoe into the hallway to get a glimpse of her singing as she cleaned up after dinner. Often, her face bore an entranced expression of being carried away to a different time and place, and I wondered if there were some secret of her heart to which I had never been privileged. Years later, when my mother became seriously ill with cancerous lesions on her brain, and had lost her ability to walk or talk or see, and certainly to sing, I bought the tape of her favorite song and prayed that in listening she would be transported once again to a place far away from her pain and impending death.
For a long time the memory of her suffering and death paralyzed me with grief, and the lyrics of that song were unbearable. Now, as time and prayer have sealed the wounds and made healing possible, those words have taken on a new and deeper meaning. Today, they come to mind as I reflect on the words of the meditation before me: "Nothing can satisfy the deepest longing and desire of the heart, except God alone."
The longing that inevitably overwhelms our hearts and minds when we lose someone we love is often the powerful, though deeply painful, experience that leads us to an understanding that our emptiness, our incompleteness, will only be filled with God. The certain way for our imperfect human hearts to recover from what often seems like an endless succession of losses is to fall in surrender to the God whose divine heart is always open to take us in and hold us until the pain has subsided.
I may never know, in this earthly life at least, what my mother yearned for, but I know that somewhere deep in her soul she knew a longing for God that is now fulfilled, a need for her Beloved that is no longer a need but a moment to moment communion.
Love, no longer just a memory, is the eternal song of her soul. And someday it will be ours to sing, as well.
_______________________________
This article is dedicated with love to Joe Castles -- an extraordinary man and special friend. You will live on always in our memory.
Mary Regina Morrell is the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers from Loyola Press
Contact
Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org
NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562-1990
mmorrell@diometuchen.org
Keywords
God
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