Maximilian Kolbe tells us, "If you have the will to love, you already have given proof that you love. What counts is the will to love. External feeling is also a fruit of grace, but it does not always follow the will." (p. 96) Just the night before, I had caught up on a blog that someone I know has started. As many bloggers do, he had written a post about what his blogs will be about. Part of it struck me as profoundly true, so that when I read the above from Kolbe, I thought of connections in my own life.
Love can heal the broken world, but love is not a feeling. Love is an act of the will - choosing to "will the good" of everyone we encounter not because of what we can get out of it, or because it feels good or because we want them to treat us well. That is not, primarily, love at all. That's a form of selfishness... it is pride. (Mike Creavey, Willing the Good)
I pondered both of these passages. In fact, I was still pondering Mike's words when I started to read Kolbe's, so they kind of melted together in my mind. (Interestingly, this is not like anything I got out of the week we shared with Kolbe. The other two words to contemplate yesterday, Mystery and Militia, were the ones I "got." For me, they must have overshadowed his teachings on Love. I even just went back and skimmed the week, and I had marked nothing of the sort.)
What I have learned about Love in these weeks of soul-searching, and in the months of undirected soul searching I've been doing, is wrapped up neatly in these lines. And yet, without the discoveries I've made in my own self, about me, about my life, about my past and future, they would be just words, I think. They touched me so deeply precisely because I have been looking at the essence of Love myself. I've given Love a chance to heal me, and my broken world. At one time--for a long time, actually--I did think of love as an emotion, a feeling, something I possessed or expressed. It was not until I thought of Love as something solely to give that I began to understand its power, its sheer magnitude.
This is not to say that I was stingy with my love before. I was loving and giving, and wore my heart on my sleeve, and, because I can't help it, I always will, I'm sure. But I used to pay more attention to how that made me feel than I should have. Yes, I carefully noted how our boys were shaping up, thanks, in good part, to the love we showered them with (and expressed not only with hugs, kisses and kind words, but with curfews, limits, rules and groundings!), but, as Mike pointed out, a part of me was looking far into the future: how would this love come back to me when I am old and they are the caregivers?
If you follow me at all, you know that I have been striving to live in the moment. That does not mean that I run around like my son and his friends, doing silly things and shouting, "YOLO!" [YOLO -- You Only Live Once] It does mean that I try to do what's right for the sake of doing what's right, whether it's related to health, exercise, food, our kids, money, work, whatever. The future does not loom so frighteningly at my door now; I see it on the horizon in each sunrise, in the beauty of each new beginning.
How does this all relate to our retreat? I'm more open, more available, to the Love of Mary, her Son, and our Father than I have ever been before. Even with my frequent doubts and questions, I can move forward. Shoot, for me, the moving forward is probably because of my doubts and questions, since they drive me to learn, to grow, to be. As I typed these last words for this morning, the sun peeked over my shoulder, warming the back of my neck. I feel it is a symbol of agreement; a one-armed hug from above.
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