Treasure moments of pure love, moments when the fullness of your love for another arises and streams out of you, as if to surround the other. You experience a gravity-like bond between you, for which there are no words or means of measurement. And you sense that nothing in heaven or on earth can severe that bond of love.
At times of remembrance, you can look back and gather those moments around you, holding them tightly together, and giving thanks for their presence in your life. Shortly before her death, my mother Millie wrote a poem that began, “I’m making a quilt of memories, and throwing away the bad ones.” At the end of the poem, she gathers that love-quilt around her, and prepares to pass on, clinging to her treasured moments of pure love.
I remember saying a final goodbye to her as she lay dying in a hospital in San Diego, California. The time had come when I had to return home to Des Moines, Iowa. How difficult to say goodbye to your mother, knowing you will never see her alive again. I did so in tears, with pure love, albeit aching love, pouring out of my heart.
I have also been present as a pastor at the death of beloved family members. An unforgettable instance: One of my wife’s fellow teachers, Beth, asked Kitty if I could visit her dying father at a nursing home in the town where I served as a pastor. They were Catholic, but had been unable to get a priest to visit her father, Henry. Beth said he was nearly comatose, but was waiting to see a priest before he died.
I got to his room and gently knocked on the closed door. Beth answered, thanking me for coming. She was there with her husband, two brothers and their wives, and her mother. As I stepped in, Beth turned toward her father, lying seemingly comatose in his bed. And she said, “Dad, the priest is here!” Henry immediately sprang to life; and gazing up at the ceiling, he attempted to sit up. While Henry struggled to say something, all seven family members quickly gathered around him, loudly exclaiming their love for him. Their cries filled the room with pure love. Then of a sudden, Henry fell back down, dead. Out of his right eye, a single tear slowly cascaded down to his cheek; half way down it stopped, as a sign of his own pure love. The entire sequence lasted perhaps thirty remarkable seconds, almost as if it had been staged.
I have also been blessed by moments of pure love with my wife and children. In the spring of 1968, my wife and I exchanged “I love you” for the first time. It happened at dusk in the unlocked church where we would be married later that year. Kitty said it first, and taking her hands in mine, I said, “And I love you, too.” We stood silently looking at each other, letting pure love dance between us. We have been together ever since.
Then there were the moments of pure love when I got to hold our children, right after their births. There is no purer love than that of a father and mother holding to their new born infants of promise. These moments are like gold nuggets panned from the streams of your daily life. You gingerly place them into your heart’s hidden pouch of treasured moments of pure love. Whether you get to take them with you, possibly to be fulfilled on the other side, remains a clouded mystery.
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