SUFFERING AND LOVE

One of our Sisters lost her cell phone.  She would be set back terribly in her professional work if she did not find it.  Besides, where would she find the money to buy a new one?  She had calls to make and could not do it.  Lots of stress and distress.  The last time she had touched the phone was in a church two hours away, to turn it off.  My mind went to the suspicious.  There was a family with small boys behind us.  Did one of them sneak an entry into her purse?  

Unexpectedly Sister had met a friend at the church.  At the discovery of the loss, Sister called her friend to ask her to look for it in and around the pew where we had sat.  A telephone call came this morning:  would the friend say she couldn’t find it?  (If someone else had found it, it could be gone forever.)

The cell phone was found in the sacristy of the church.  Whoever had found it at the pew had placed it in a safe place where the owner could find it.

The loss of a cell phone is an every-day kind of grief that takes place for all of us sooner or later.  It’s just a tiny example of the many sufferings of life.  In her book, The Emergent Christ,  Ilia Delio makes a big point that suffering is connected with love.  God is love.  How can one embrace the suffering from having lost one’s cell phone?  On hind sight, at least, one can see points of love in the story above.  The friend was there for Sister.  The one who found it respected that the owner would be delighted to have the phone. 

Relationship

Have you noticed how often the word “love” is appearing in advertisements?  The word “love” must have an attraction to draw the attention of people more than it used to have.  I wonder about that, because it seems we are being called more and more to be a loving people. This love is being  expressed  through relationships in a diversity of cultures, in and through the social media, in a growing volunteerism, etc.

Are we growing from a culture focused primarily on being rational, having “the facts”, judging, counting, and categorizing everything as things to a more relational mode of living?   In the book The Social Animal, David Brooks tells of the difference between how North Americans and Chinese respond to a test to categorize the subjects in a picture of a cow, a chicken, and grass.  The North Americans point out that the cow and the chicken are animals.  The Chinese  put  the cow and the grass together because they are related.    

Spoon or Soup

Hello, out there!  Have you ever had the experience of being in a room or other space and, not seeing anything nor hearing anything, were able to sense that someone else was present?   That is how it is with God for me:  can’t see God, can’t hear God, but there is a great Personal Presence everywhere that I know is there.

Recently I listened to a talk by Edward Hays in which he gave the analogy of the use of a spoon used to carry soup to the mouth.  Which would you rather be – the spoon, or the soup?   Edward said that many of us “religious” people are like the spoon, able to feed the nutritious stuff about God, and forgetting that it is the soup itself in which people are interested.  Hey! It’s difficult to be the soup. 

To know God’s active presence and to live accordingly takes the gift of Faith.  I know that I had nothing to do with the fact that I have this gift.  I do know that a personal response of love on my part helps in the relationship.  It helps to sense that great Personal Presence that is everywhere.

Desire

I feel like I’m swimming in an ocean of desire. 

The huge upheaval in Egypt swept up out of an aching desire on the part of the Egyptian people for their freedom from a corrupt regime.  Desire, freedom, want, longing for, seeking, are words that attempt to describe the human heart.

The 33 miners who had been trapped for over two months and then were rescued still seek healing from their horrible experience.  Many returning veterans long for their former life of innocence from the horrors of war.

Wherever I look, there is desire.  Today is Valentine’s Day.  Love is desire.  The translation of “I love you” in Spanish is: “te quiero”, or “I want you”.    Someone recently reminded me that a vacuum always seeks to be filled.  Desire is like a vacuum which attracts the loved one and the union with God and with others for which we were created. 

The choice to live in poverty “without anything of one’s own” by Saint Francis was indeed the desire to be open for love in God, who is love.

Happy Valentine’s Day!