Loving what gets left behind

My maternal grandmother died in 1985, and my grandpa remarried a few years later, at almost eighty years of age.  I liked my new step-grandmother right away, and over the years became very fond of her.  When I went back to college to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree so I could go to seminary, it was she and my grandpa footed the bill for my tuition.  So a few years later, after she and my grandpa had died, I was faced with a little dilemma.

It began when I took up regular practice of praying the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.   I would get to the point at the end of the service where one adds personal prayers, including prayers for the dead.  I would pray for my deceased grandparents on my father’s side. And when it came to my mother’s parents, Gertrude and Frank, I would naturally pray for them together, as they were together for the first 20 years of my life, as they were together for over fifty years of marriage.  But I would always think of my Step-grandma Mary Beth at the same time, but it didn’t feel right to mention her in the same breath as them, and it didn’t feel right not to.   It was a long time before my heart was completely settled on this point.  Strange as it sounds, it felt disloyal not to give Gertrude her pride of place, as my Grandma and as Frank’s wife.  But I also didn’t want to make Mary Beth a second-class citizen in my prayers.

This problem I had about how to pray for my Grandfather’s wives, says something about how I understood love.  I think most human beings start out as with the idea that there is only so much love to go around.  I can only love this person more by loving that person less.  And the same goes for those who love me.  If they love someone else more, there is that much less love available for me.  This is a very natural way for us to think about love, because of our experience as small children who were completely dependent for our very survival on our parents’ love.  And our parents were limited.  They only had so much to give.  We were attuned to every ebb and flow of their attention and affection, and when it was directed elsewhere, to their work, or to each other, or, God forbid, to our brothers and sisters, we couldn’t help but feel that there was less for us. 

We grow and enter adolescence and develop more resilience and a capacity to love ourselves, but we still need a lot of love and reassurance from the outside.  And that’s also about the time that it starts to really sink in for us that our parents are going to die, that there is going to come a day when there is nobody left in the world who is obliged to love us.  And so a powerful new need awakens, the desire to find someone in the world with whom we can create a new bond to take the place of the one we had with our father and mother, to have someone in the world who will love us and make life’s journey with us all the way to the end.  Along with that yearning for a mate comes the equally powerful desire to have offspring, so that when we leave this world, someone will remain behind to remember us, someone who will keep the names and the values, the physical features and the stories that we pass on to them alive.

Now this is obviously a simplistic and incomplete description of human development, but I think it helps us see ordinary human love, family love, as a way of coming to grips with and even overcoming death.  And that is a beautiful thing.  Once when I was a still a bachelor I was walking through the Mission District in San Francisco at rush hour and saw an older Chinese man coming down the sidewalk, with a lined face and gray hair, but a body that was still lean and tall and strong.  He was dressed in tradesman’s coveralls and in his arms he held a girl of three or four years of age.  He was carrying her diagonally across his body facing out, with one arm under her arm and around her chest, and the other hand under the crook of her knee, so her other leg swung free.  She was laughing and wriggling as he swung her from side to side, and on his face was a smile of pure joy.  The sight of them struck deep into my heart, and I understood, in a way I never had before what it means to play with your granddaughter and know that your love will live on in her long after you’re gone.

The Sadducees of the Gospels believed that this kind of love is enough.  They came from the upper classes, people who were prosperous and well-fed and had large families, and for them the hope that they would live on in their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children was enough.  If they thought of resurrection from the dead, they supposed it would have to be a kind of family reunion, where you picked up where you left off with your relationships on the other side of the grave.  They were also conservative people, who upheld a traditional interpretation of the laws of Moses, so they thought a lot about cases, and real-world practical implications.  When they argued against the resurrection, it was because of the legal problems it would create, problems like the case of the woman who married the seven brothers.  Better to be satisfied, they said, to love those who will love you in return, and let life take its course, and give death its due.

But Jesus doesn’t think about cases.  Jesus thinks about that woman who was married to the seven brothers, who watched each one of them die, and never did have a child.  And Jesus question about her resurrection is not “whose wife will she be?”  Jesus’ question is what is her hope?  It’s the same question he asks about widow of Nain, following the body of her only son out of town to the burying ground.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers whose children are stricken with hunger, or mental illness, or disability or disease, and about the ones who could have given a child a loving home but were never blessed to have one, and the ones whose marriages were broken by death, or addiction, or divorce.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers who sent sons off to war, who never returned, or who came back broken.  What is their hope?  What is their legacy? 

And for an answer Jesus also looks to Moses, but not to Moses the author of laws.  Jesus looks to Moses, the man who came face to face with the living God, who turned aside from tending his father-in-laws flock to behold a bush that burned but was not consumed.  Jesus felt the anguish, and the loneliness, and the hopelessness of those who had no answer to death, and he thought of Moses who heard the voice from the burning bush that said, “I am.  I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and I am your God.  And I have heard the affliction of my people.  Their cry has come to me and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the bondage in which they are oppressed.”

It’s not that there is anything wrong with ordinary human love, with the love of husband and wife, and parent and child, and grandparent and grandchild.  But it doesn’t always work out the way we want it to, and anyway, even when it is enough for us, it is not enough for God.  It is not enough for God that we should love and die, and vanish like smoke.  God has more to give us than that.  In Jesus Christ God has given us the life that doesn’t need to find a work-around for death.  In Christ we are children of a parent whose love is not limited, who does not love the childless widow any less than the woman whose house is filled with grandchildren.  Christ is the bearer of the gift of that love and that life because it came to him first, and because he will be there to enjoy it with us at the last, and the gift is called resurrection.