Lent... a love story

In my memory, he stands tall and straight like the Georgia pines around his house. Wearing overalls with a can of Prince Albert tobacco and a packet of paper in his pocket, he sits on his heels to roll his cigarette, surveying the world around him. Yesterday, stooped, slight of frame and trembling, he stood by the casket of his wife of seventy four years to say his last good by to the woman he has loved since he was seventeen. As she descended into the pits of the hell of Alzheimer’s, he stood by her side and with the help of children, kept her home with him until the end. His was the last face she knew even when she couldn’t remember his name. Their marriage was not a happily ever after. Times were hard and Calhoun men are notoriously difficult to live with. But the love remained, refined by conflict and struggle, until the pure flame that sprung into being when he was sneaking kisses at school became a selfless devotion to her well being.
I sat with him for a few minutes talking about his new reality. He told me about coming home, a home without her presence, sleeping in his bed, waking up in the night to go sit in his chair and weeping for an hour. He has suffered an amputation of the spirit and it hurts like hell. Telling him I had no idea how he must be feeling (he informed me I got that right), I told him I hoped he would continue to cry, to grieve, to mourn the loss of his beloved Burma Lou. He spoke of his fear of being suffocated by tender loving care, of not being allowed to stand on his own as much as he could. And he spoke of feeling he had nothing to live for now. I reminded him he was a Calhoun man, tough as a corn cob, who never flinched from hard work. This will be the hardest work he has ever done. And I also told him I had asked Jesse to whop him up side the head when he talked about nothing to live for. I reminded him there were others of us who still need him, the last of the Calhoun brothers living, to be our stack pole, our connection to our parents and their family.
Love does not come cheap. Sometimes it comes with grace and ease but always it is given life by struggle and suffering. New mothers and fathers survey their little babies with a love the depth of which never fails to surprise. But, they live out that love through the years paying the price for that love in loss of sleep, feeding, clothing, teaching, weeping, frustration and pride. We find our mates, the persons who delight us and take delight in us. We marry. We live together. Our points of pleasure and attraction often become blisters raised on our soul as we struggle with the fit of our relationship. Our parents who brought us into this world and shaped it for us, are flawed even as we are. The love we felt for them as a child often turns to a benign mild contempt as we grow away from them into our adulthood. Most of us leave that form of loving behind as we mature and learn to see our parents as individuals, people like us who have their own gifts and struggles.
Love and loving is never a one size fits all process. Each relationship is unique unto itself and yet the same. “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we follow his commandment, as you have heard from the beginning, that you follow love.” This passage from the Second Letter of John, a short loving note written to the “elect lady and her children”, calls us to follow love.
Lent is in the final analysis a love story. God so loved the world that he sent someone to love us here on earth. The power of that unadulterated pure loving has transformed lives through the centuries that have followed. My calling during Lent is to learn how to love more completely God, myself and others... to live that love, to speak love in truth, to become a purer, brighter flame of loving until one day my love returns to its Creator, refined and strong. Dear One in Three, give me strength to endure the furnace and laughter for living as I stumble along loving as best I can all those who share my life. Help me not take myself too seriously and remind me that we all deserve a heaping helping of love without strings attached. Let me be a loving respite for those who need a place to lay their weary heads and be my refuge in times of trouble, Lord. I love you best, Lord. Let my life show it, please.