What could cause you to yearn for love in a loveless world? By what means do you continue to recognize that love is at the heart of all things even while it is not valued here? Here is a fine example that means and end are the same. For love is what you are as well as what you strive for. Love is means and end. COL 1:16
When I was a child, I knelt humble before a satin wrapped altar, awed by a statue of Christ. I wanted only the love of God. I implored Jesus to know me, though I had little clue about myself. I invited God to take my heart. Who can say why one so small would feel such serious need for God and offer a sincere love.
What was clear in that early cluster of years, was a gaping longing in a heart scant of worldly experience. What I felt was a God of beauty, silence, elegance, a great compassionate Companion. In short, I felt perpetual Help. I ached for that Friendship in bones that were already forming a little bit bent.
Beside that was fear, the reality of loss, the understanding that adults angered and warred and wept and were given to fits of wrongly inelegant and violent behavior.
In the innocence of life’s opening, Mary Elizabeth sheltered an inborn kindness, the gentle beneficence of a good little person of curiosity. My love was indiscriminate in protection of the helpless, picking up robin’s eggs fallen from the nest, rescuing daddy long legs. The boys who plucked their appendages laughed as they languished on hot cement.
My dearest friend, Mr. Lollipop, a tabby of black and burnished gold had his eye scratched out in a battle one night. God, I loved him! A few days later he disappeared. I hope my parents had put him down. Broken-heartedness and loss encroached upon innocence. But the deeper core of a self that loved beauty and right living bore its imprint upon everything to come. Jess (Jesus) and Mary became for me, mysterious comforters, the tenderness in which I surrendered my helplessness.
By the age of twelve, I told my mother I was going to be working for Jesus. But how do you know? she stammered. We were not overtly religious. He told me. I do not recall hearing Him speak but it was clear as baby blue to a pilot in a summer sky far above the world.
As I am closing in upon 70, making a little appraisal of all these years of desiring more love, more beauty, more goodness, I seem to be the same. My personality has gone round as often as the hands of time, striking a recurrent midnight and with each circle, stretching, changing. The outer person tried nobly to accommodate the world. There have been so many roles played well or abysmally, but none could squash the essential innocence that longed to express itself as Truth.
There is ripeness in this season of my journey. The Vine from which I have sprouted is thick and strong. My yield is delicate, just a bump of a berry where a fecund fruit begins. The sweetness in my essence is owed to the Son. It is the very same as the one tasted by a young Mary Elizabeth, who knelt on a velvet altar step, looking up in search of Love.
Her heart gave “all in” faith to a graceful Being of unconditional Love. And Love responded. Her search to find beauty travailed countless rocky trails in the world, in pursuit of the perfect Artist. That journey became an extraordinary canvas of Christ’s face.
The ravages of time and experience cannot bitter the essential knowing of who and what I am, though I have suffered many blows and given my share. I find my utmost self is abundantly loving, and I love that.
In me remains a constancy of someone authentic, worthy, wise, with hope, faith and holy desire, enlivened at this gateway to the parlor of elders. The longing to be someone more valuable is mostly gone in the wake of soul valuing. I dare to share more vulnerably, trusting the impulse inside, but again that vulnerability is the honesty and delicate openness of the child who accepts that some may glare at the boldness of exposed heartedness.
Certainly, I am a bumbling human being, jouncing in the bowels of yet another bus. Even this is viewed as precious. But so much more than that am I, are We. Without exception, any being who looks honestly will see their life as means and end to love, the love that you knew before you had words and know now as the very same, as your Self. We are love beginning and ending, sourced and expressed eternally. There is no other.
God and I are no longer as it was, Mary Elizabeth in a pew and Jess in a statue. We are not two bodies side by side, but a fragrance, the perfume of a lily and a Rose made whole. We are subtle scents intermingling in rich and intimate creativity.
Wisdom has neither grown nor abated but is an unfolding identity in the way a caterpillar knows it is a butterfly. No doubt Jesus understood childhood as the realm which most apparently expresses this God likeness.
Let the little children come to Me and do not forbid them for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:14 NKJV
This Kingdom is not private but a universal birthright. Wisdom is shared. Love is shared. It is Ours, Us, and if you look within, beneath the veil, you are likely to find the babe of your life is the Love of Your Life Who goes on and on unharmed by the world, as
…Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever Hebrews 13:8
Ever and Ever, Love,
MaryBeth
