Theology Of Love 18

 The great challenge of the Theology of Love, is in being people who love when the circumstances are least favourable.  We always have the familiar excuses to draw from.  I am tired, hungry, in a hurry, I'm having a bad day, my mother just died, people are behaving like jerks, my spouse is cheating on me, I have cancer, and the beast goes on.

Sometimes we really can't go on.  We are walking the pavement, demoralized, broken down, destroyed.  Those are the times we usually feel least capable of loving, because we are so completely burntout  and empty  Nothing resonates with life.  The music has died.  

I have been there.  We have all been there.  I remember when my mother died.  I arrived at the hospital just a half hour or so on the late side and she lay there in her bed in her deepest rest.   My aunt and I held each other up for a while, then I saw the people I was in ministry with, then I visited for a while with my father and brother.  After that I was downtown for ministry and to give pastoral care.  I must have been insane for doing this.  But the show must go on. 

But it wasn't a show.  The young male and female street hookers had taken me into their lives as a trusted friend.  They were consoling, comforting as we sat together in the coffee shop that night.  They were exchanging the support I had given them, and they were giving back.  I had not planned or prepared for this.  

That was the most crucial lesson of love that I learned that night.  That love is that which is created out of nothing.  Love creates itself out of nothing.  In our deepest darkness, despair, emptiness and loss, there will suddenly appear that tiny little candle burning against the darkness.  

Gentle Reader, cling to that image of the little candle, the little flame, appearing so fragile, so vulnerable to being snuffed out by the fetid draft, only to recover and regain its strength.  I find it interesting that the apartment building I live in is named Candela Place.  Candela is the Spanish word for that little candle flame, that tiny light of hope burning in the darkness, and guiding us through the darkness into the realms of light.