Monday, January 29, 2007
"LOVE NEVER FAILS"
That was the topic of yesterday's homily. It was also the entire content. Father took up the microphone and said those words three times in a commanding voice; then he sat down; and we were left with silence for the span of maybe ten minutes to wrestle with the words.
I knew what I was supposed to think--where St. Paul's Letter to the Corinthians was supposed to lead me--to lots of pious thoughts about the glory of love of our fellow man. I also knew that experience was taking me in a different direction. By the end of this period of reflection I could respond to his charge in only one way: "Yes it does fail. Way too often." I couldn't think of a single person in my life who has loved me and whom I have loved who has not disappointed me at least once. Imperfection is the plague of man, even as the expectation of perfection never leaves us. We can easily become disillusioned.
While long homilies with theological reflections and direction for improvement in our lives tend to go in one ear and out the other despite my best intentions of taking something home, these three words have been echoing in my thoughts ever since Mass, and they were there again as I awoke this morning thinking about last night's Hallmark Presentation, a story of a young man returned from the Second World War to a small farm community where his parents had lived before their death, and where his only brother was in prison at age 17. The man was homeless and rootless until he reached out in love to a hurting boy who responded. Seeing the essential goodness of the young man, other townspeople embraced him, and he was finding a place for himself at last. Then the boy died. Love had once again failed. To a heart broken by war and death, one more death was visited upon it, and the young man ran away from all that he had found, unable to deal with yet another failure.
The story had begun with the war vet talking with an old man about fishing. It ended when he discovered that the old man he had talked with at the beginning of the story had been dead for five years. Someone from beyond the grave had reached out to a lonely young man--someone who should not have been there. Love, it seemed at last, was not conquered by the death that had consumed his life for too many years. The young man returned to the town where he had at last found a reason to hope.
Love in the movie had really not failed after all despite all appearances to the contrary.
Such a story turned my thoughts to God. Then the lights came on. Man's love fails. God's love never does. And thanks to His grace, even man's love has been redeemed by the cross and by the resurrection. The love that never fails is the promise of eternal life. Death, the ultimate failure of love, has been overcome. The only place to seek that promise is in submission of our will to the Father as Christ demonstrated for us in Gethsemane. There will always be a price, and many will never pay it. Yet in that submission is the promise of all the love that has ever been and ever will be. Love that never fails.
