Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love . . . I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.” (John 15.9, 15-17)
In the 1997 movie, In the Gloaming, directed by Christopher Reeve and starring Glenn Close as Janet, we are presented with a picture of a mother’s love for her son, who is dying of AIDS. Danny, a young newspaper reporter in San Francisco returns home to New York to die. As the movie beautifully and slowly moves over the last months of Danny’s life, we witness the bond of love that holds mother and son together.
At one point in the movie, Janet enters the room where Danny is asleep in his bed, his nurse, Maggie, played by Whoopi Goldberg, sits in a chair next to the bed. “Does Dr. Berman really know what he is talking about? Janet asks Maggie. The nurse explains that Danny’s T-cell count is so low that no doctor can save him.
“Danny has come home to die,” Maggie says. Janet answers, “We can’t let that happen.” Maggie explains that Danny has a DNR order, explaining that it means he does not want to be resuscitated when the end comes. Pausing, Maggie looks at Janet and says, “The best thing you can do for him now is to love him.”
As the mother’s eyes, filled with tears, look at her son’s body, covered in sores, Maggie says, “Why don’t you go ahead and touch him?” Janet answers, “I used to touch him.” Maggie responds, “You still can.” Janet reaches out and softly touches her son’s neck, feeling for his pulse. Maggie then shows her how to attach the IV that provides Danny with his medications.
A few days later, as mother and son sit together on the patio, looking at the sun slowly set, Janet says to Danny, “Did you love? Were you loved in return?” Danny pauses and then answers, “Yes.” Janet smiles and simply replies, “Okay,” content to know that her son had loved and had received love in his brief stay on earth. It is enough to give her strength to face the end.
Several nights later, Danny leans into his mother’s arms. When he stops talking, Janet looks at him and sees that he has died, mother and son together in his last moment as they had been in his first moment. As the movie ends, we see that its central message was found in the question that Janet had asked Danny, “Did you love? Were you loved in return?”
And perhaps, when all is said and done, that is the central message, not only of a Hollywood movie, but of every person’s life. While we walked this earth, did we love and were we loved in return? Everything else pales when compared to that central purpose of life–loving others and being loved by others. Without that exchange of love, a person’s life has a glaring emptiness, as if we were given the gift of life without an instruction manual on how to put it together.
Today, in that scripture passage, as the life of Rabbi Jesus draws to a close, his last days spent with those he loved, he speaks to them of the meaning of life, compressing his teachings into the same singular message of love. “As the Father has loved me, so I also love you. Remain in my love,” he says to them, calling them to love one another as he has loved them.
As he shares with them this last teaching, he explains that “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” a definition of love that he will write, not on a page, but on the cross, as he offers his life for others, the final expression of self-giving that he has shown throughout his days, a continuous outpouring of love from the first moment of his life on earth to the last, giving his followers a living example of divine love, selfless, sacrificial, ceaseless.
One of the most famous studies in psychology began in 1938, when a Harvard professor decided to do a longitudinal study of 268 sophomores during the Great Depression, hoping to find clues as to what made for a healthy and happy life. The study has continued to the present day, covering over eighty years, only a handful of the men still alive.
What the study has shown consistently over the years is that happiness comes from good relationships, not from money or fame, and that the connections that people make are much better predictors of long and happy lives more so than social class, IQ, or genetics. As one researcher summed up the findings, “Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier and the loners often died earlier. Loneliness kills,” he said, “it’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”
In many ways, the study has uncovered the essence of life, the central truth that, if followed, allows a person to live fully. And that truth is to love fully. Or as Rabbi Jesus instructed his followers thousands of years before the Harvard study, “Love one another,” distilling his life and his message into this core principle.
The irony, of course, is that so many people choose to construct a life around other things, such as the pursuit of money, the seeking out of pleasure, or the amassing of power, all of which prove in the long run to sabotage and to destroy the happiness that everyone seemingly wants because they do not answer the greatest need that our souls desire–to love and to be loved.
We have been created for love. It could not be otherwise because the source of our life comes from the One who is Love. He shared his divine love with us, his essence found in an outpouring of love, breathing into us the spirit of life, animating us and allowing us to walk upon the face of the earth. And that spirit stays with us all our days, urging us to move towards the other, seeking the same communion with others that God has with us from that first shared breath.
A story passed down from the Middle Ages tells of an abbot of a monastery who came to see that a young man had come to the cloister out of a false sense of renunciation. One day the abbot said to the postulant, “My friend, have you never been in love?” The young man quickly answered, “Oh no! Never, Father!”
The abbot looked at the young man with sadness and asked him a simple question, “How then do you want to love the Creator if you have never been capable of loving a creature?” In that question, we again find the meaning of life, wherever it is lived, in the simple equation that life must equal love. And why? Because the God of life is the God of love. And, made in his image and likeness, we are made for the same outpouring of love.
At some point in human history, call it the Fall or call it human weakness, something went wrong and we altered our DNA, substituting a love of self for a love of others, so completely contrary to the image of God that we often are not recognizable as his children, interested in hoarding rather than sharing, intent on seeing ourselves as superior to others rather than as the same, incapable of reaching out to others in need because we are afraid it will cost us too much.
Created by the God who never uses a measuring cup when pouring out his love, we measure ours in teaspoons or half-teaspoons, patting ourselves on the back for our miserly measures of love, refusing to see that love is supposed to be an overflowing river, not a drip from a faucet. As a consequence, the world steadily distances itself from the God who created it to be a playground for his children rather than an isolation cell in a prison of our own making.
Recently, a woman who was ordained an Episcopal priest shared with readers the story of her own journey in life, at one point finding herself losing her sense of purpose, unsure of the meaning of life, lost in the wilderness. She felt herself drifting away from the presence of God and unsure of how to find it again. While her heart still longed, her hands could not touch him.
She relates that she finally wondered what was left in life. She writes, “And like an echo from a far-off hillside, the word came. Love. . . Love remained.” With that word from “a far-off hillside,” she began to reconstruct her world, building, as she said, “a faith that acknowledges the holiness and divinity in everyone without qualification. One with open doors and permeable walls. A faith that admits God is beyond knowing and naming and has many faces. One that lives out the creed that there is no law higher than love.”
With that realization, she had learned to accept the uncertainty of many things because of knowing at least this much: “Love is alive.” For her, the truth came when she still had time to live in a world where love is alive, or “to bear fruit that will remain,” as Rabbi Jesus told his disciples, inferring that love, because it is alive, bears fruit, much the same as any fruit tree that lives.
The gifted preacher, Walter Burghardt, a Jesuit priest, told of his attending a performance one evening at the Kennedy Center. As he sat in the darkness, a “superb songstress,” as he said, moved him mightily, especially with two lines of a song that were composed by a musician who had died of AIDS. The two lines were these: Love is all we have for now/ what we don’t have is time.”
As Burghard said, he recognized in those words a clarion call to love. We can see in them the same call issued by the Rabbi of Galilee to his followers, knowing his end on earth is coming, and asking them to continue his way of living in the world, a way of life that is fueled by a radical, self-giving love. What he made clear to them–and to us–is that we are wasting our time on anything else. A life without love is not a life worth living. And, while we like to look the other way, we don’t have all the time in the world to figure out this truth. Because what we don’t have is time.
–Jeremy Myers
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