Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter Year B: Descending Love.
Love consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that God first loved us.
Dorothy Day, Servant of God and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was living with a professed atheist and anarchist in a common law marriage on Staten Island when she discovered she was pregnant. In her autobiography she wrote that up to that point in her life she enjoyed a kind of natural happiness. She adored the Englishman Forster Batterham even though she knew he would never marry her. She got her energy from championing all sorts of causes, moving in anti-establishment circles, and being Forster’s companion. But she admits there was a restlessness in her heart.
Her pregnancy brought her self-absorbed lifestyle to an end. When she decided to accept the life God had entrusted to her, her lover left her. In her biography she says that the acceptance of the gift of a child sparked a mysterious conversion in her. The gift of motherhood was her first step on a spiritual journey which opened her heart outwards towards the love of Jesus and the least of his brothers and sisters, the poor. Eventually she and her daughter were baptized in the Roman Catholic Faith.
Robert Ellsberg, writer of several books on the saints, says that “(Dorothy) spent lonely years in the wilderness, raising her child alone, while praying for some sense of reconciling her faith and her commitment to social justice.” This period of loneliness, rejection, being misunderstood and derided by former friends prepared her for the work God needed her to do. It was through the gift of motherhood and her surrender to it that Dorothy experienced the love that descends from above, unmerited, unanticipated: the love that first loves us, God’s love.
Here is the truth: Our first experience of love is always the love from above, the love of God that is mediated (channeled) though others, especially our mothers. We awaken to love. The first love of our life is the initiative that God takes. Any love that we give to God is always a response to his first having loved us. We seek God because his love has already found us. We thirst for God because he has already given us a taste of his love. We climb out of the darkness of selfishness towards a light that has already shone upon us. This is what happened to Dorothy. She experienced in the gift of her daughter’s birth a vanishing of the identity she had been trying to make for herself and an initiation into a life for someone else, her daughter Tamar. She wrote: ”Being a mother is fulfillment, it is surrender to others, it is love and therefore, of course, it is suffering.”
Sue Delaney, a wife, mother and grandmother living and clinical psychologist says about motherhood and the spiritual life: “When a woman becomes a mother, she…she enters into a life of self-denying service to her child—a life far more demanding than that asked by a guru of his disciple, an obedience far greater than any vow can command.”
Isn’t it a life of surrender that Jesus invites us to when he says, “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Take the first step.” he says, “as I did. Love those who may never be able to love you back. Love someone first who may never understand during your lifetime what you are trying to give them. In the suffering you experience for love’s sake you will know a joy that no one can take away. It is my joy,” Jesus tells us. May our mothers, whether living or deceased know our gratitude for surrendering to the gift of life and may each of us know the joy of being a channel of God’s love.
Love consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that God first loved us.
Dorothy Day, Servant of God and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was living with a professed atheist and anarchist in a common law marriage on Staten Island when she discovered she was pregnant. In her autobiography she wrote that up to that point in her life she enjoyed a kind of natural happiness. She adored the Englishman Forster Batterham even though she knew he would never marry her. She got her energy from championing all sorts of causes, moving in anti-establishment circles, and being Forster’s companion. But she admits there was a restlessness in her heart.
Her pregnancy brought her self-absorbed lifestyle to an end. When she decided to accept the life God had entrusted to her, her lover left her. In her biography she says that the acceptance of the gift of a child sparked a mysterious conversion in her. The gift of motherhood was her first step on a spiritual journey which opened her heart outwards towards the love of Jesus and the least of his brothers and sisters, the poor. Eventually she and her daughter were baptized in the Roman Catholic Faith.