There is peace beneath the wings of love

There is peace beneath the wings of love
By Mary Morrell

"Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts. Then it is real and pure." - Mother Teresa of Calcutta

My father's wake was a very difficult time for me, but even in the most painful of experiences there are powerful moments of truth and learning.

For me, the lessons often come from my children. On this particular night, my youngest son had chosen to express his grief and love by drawing pictures and writing "I love you Poppy" on little pieces of paper and placing them around my father's body as it lay in repose. Crosses, hearts and crooked XXXs and OOOs were lined up with as much importance as the American flag which had been folded and rested on the casket. His demonstrations of love had brought most of the adults in the funeral parlor to tears and one rather elderly on-looker was heard to say, 'Oh look, he's just like a little person."

With that my son crawled up on my lap and said stoically, "I don't like being a little person. It hurts too much."

I hugged him tightly to myself and whispered in his ear, "I know. It hurts to be a big person, too." In an incredibly touching moment he looked up at me and brushed large tears off my cheeks. We understood each other. We shared in the grief.

And he reminded me of an often painful truth -- it's hard to be human.

It's hard to be human because it hurts to be human, and it hurts for the same reason that it's a joy - because we love.

And it seems the more we love, the more we are open to hurt from loving and the experience may leave us wondering if love is worth it; if the vulnerability that is required of real love isn't more something to be feared than something to be valued.

There were times in my own life when the pain of losing someone I loved was so overwhelming that I determined I would build walls around my heart so as not to be hurt the next time. But in the midst of the pain I soon learned something that was professed by Irish author Enid Starkie: "Unhurt people are not much good in the world."

And the greatest model for us was our own Christ who loved to what others considered excess, who painfully lamented that his love was neither accepted nor returned, crying, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!" (Luke 13)

It was this bruised and wounded Jesus, rejected, denied and spat upon, who continued to love none the less -- enough to die for his Beloved.

So great a love is difficult to understand, and perhaps more difficult to accept because it often engenders the fear of expectation - what do I have to give in return? But what is it we face in being gathered under the wings of Love?

Peace of heart and soul -- and the surety that love makes being human the gift it was meant to be.

----------------------------------

Mary Morrell is the Associate Director of the Office of Religious Education for the Diocese of Metuchen, NJ, and the mother of six sons. She is also the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers from Loyola Press; Things My Father Taught Me, a bi-weekly column that appears in several Catholic newspapers, I'll Walk With God, a monthly newsletter published by the Metuchen Diocesan Office of Religious Education, and a writer for Real Faith TV, produced by the Diocese of Trenton, Office of Communication.

Contact

Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org NJ, US
Mary Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Relgious Education, 732 562-1990

Email

mmorrell@diometuchen.org

Keywords

love

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