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July/August 2007 Issue
Charity
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A
contemporary Jesuit poet wrote this provocative description
about the meaning of love: "Love means that I must Wander
through the rubble Of my squandered dreams And in the
fragile ashes Of painful burnt-out memories….." (God
of Untold Tales, Michael Moynahan, S.J., San Jose Resource
1979)
This is not the usual upbeat, soaring
or romanticized ideal of inspirational love. This means
that for love to survive and fl ourish, there's a price
to pay. That price is looking hard and long at our own
failures in loving and learning to grow up and out of
them. We can't do this by ourselves. It takes other
loving people to help us grow up in the power to love. |
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That's why the followers of Christ have a
great advantage: we have the Lord of all love as the center
of our communities. From his presence to us in the Eucharist,
in his Word in the Scriptures, and in one another through
baptism, we live in his aura of love. That should be the most
powerful energy at work in his communities, the church. It
is there to form us into a people equipped with His power
of loving. That dynamic is familiar to us through our liturgies:
we continually look back at those squandered dreams and painful
memories - not to be morbid, but to repent and make a new
and fresh start.
The Lord's forgiveness - and the forgiveness
we extend to one another - give us the fresh start we need.
And then we go about the ministry of loving. That ministry
takes on as many forms as there are individuals who present
themselves for a service of love. Whatever form our love for
others may take, we know that we are able to love because
the Lord has fi rst loved us. And there was no limit to his
love, as he demonstrated to the very end with the gift of
his own life for us. His love for us is the jump-start for
our love for God and for our neighbor. His love for us also
makes it possible, no matter what our failures, to love even
ourselves.
Msgr. Gaspar F. Ancona is recently retired.
He is the author of Where the Star Came to Rest, a history
of the Diocese of Grand Rapids.
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