Perfect joy comes from ultimate love
Today is Mother’s Day. An appropriate day to consider the ultimate possibilities of love. Through the centuries, women take the risk of love to bring children into the world. Often in terrible circumstances, under difficult, lonely, economically strained conditions. Women became mothers at the risk of their lives in times past and still in many parts of the world where medical care is sketchy or non-existent. And once the children are born, good mothers continue to put the welfare of their children above their own need for rest, for recreation, for all they might have had without the burden of care for dependent lives. Whether they stay at home with their children or must work outside to provide their care, mothers remain the primary paradigm of constancy in our world. Even mothers who neglect or deny their children prove the paradigm because we expect them to do otherwise. A mother’s love is mythic. If we got it from our mothers it needs no explanation; if we didn’t get it, we may spend our lives looking for it or suffering its lack.
Father-love, of course, can be equally heroic and is certainly as mythic, if in distinct ways. Psychologists have only begun to explore how we need our parents, and how we seek to supply parent figures if one or another was absent or inadequate. The happy adult will originally have had, or restored for themselves through mentors, the mythic sources of love and constancy we seem to require at the root of ourselves. And maybe this isn’t so strange, since God is love, and we are God’s children. Love is literally at the root of our identity. We seem to know this and need it as much as air and food and shelter. We’re made from love, and for happiness, according to the most basic catechisms. Unless and until we discover this love for ourselves, we won’t really be happy. Like Augustine said, we’re restless until we rest in ultimate love. So Jesus tells us: Remain in me, as I remain in my Father.
How do we find our way to this kind of love, especially if we didn’t experience it originally or lost it along the way? Jesus points us to the one unshakeable command of his Kingdom: Love one another as I love you. It’s no good to lament that we didn’t get the love we needed or don’t get it now if we’re unwilling to give it to those who need it from us. Jesus doesn’t invite us to love each other. He doesn’t recommend that we do. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He commands it. Love is an imperative, because the fulfillment of life is impossible without it.
05 – May 10, 2015 – 6th Sunday of Easter
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