WITHOUT LOVE, THERE IS NO ULTIMATE MEANING OR PURPOSE

"Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived.  Twice in that life I have been given the choice: as a boy, and as a man. The boy chose safety. The man chose suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal." — C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands movie (1993)

 

In 1993, a movie came out about the love and marriage of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidson, under the title Shadowlands. Sir Anthony Hopkins played the role of Lewis and Debra Winger starred as Joy Davidson. I enjoyed the movie very much. Some critics said that the movie lacked focus on the towering literary and Christian contributions of C.S. Lewis to the world. Okay.

 

But the question remains: "Why love, if losing hurts so much?" My answer is this: Because it is the only thing really worth having or pursuing. Like the the line in the movie, I have only the life I have lived. That life has been marked by dissipation, mortification, introspection, confession, redemption, divine intervention, prayerful meditation, internal revelation and spiritual adoption. 

At the foundation of my life I have found God's love. In my sin and selfishness, my disease and paralysis, I found suffering. It was all changed by love (human and divine).  

I'm a deeply flawed man: I have grieved and caused grief, betrayed and been betrayed, mocked and been mocked, cursed and been cursed, ignored and been ignored, hurt and been hurt, forgiven and been forgiven. 

It is in forgiveness—both giving and receiving it—that the sun breaks through the clouds; more importantly, the Son breaks through the clouds. I have only the life I have lived. Without love it would not have made sense. It would been without purpose or meaning. Purpose and meaning. Without it, people lose hope. Without hope, death can seem preferable to life. 

Near where I live, people have died needlessly. The man in the house across the street committed suicide. A neighbour's son overdosed, another died of alcoholism, another essentially gave up on life. Someone else I know recently attempted suicide. Fortunately, she was unsuccessful. 

You can blame the isolation people experienced through COVID lockdowns, or the way social order seems to be collapsing around us. Both of those things are true, but they miss the central point of why people are in such despair. People need God in their lives through His Son Jesus Christ.[1] 

 

Somebody may howl in protest and indignation at this assertion. I believe it with all my heart! It has been the truth of my life and the life I have lived. I have not been dissuaded from this by multiple sclerosis or cancer, serious disability or extensive paralysis, rejection, loss, disappointment with life or clinical depression. The light of the Son has shone through the darkest of clouds. Tears of sorrow and tears of joys flowed together simultaneously.[2] It is Christ's love that has prevailed. 

 

Why love if losing hurts so much? Because through love of, and for Christ , the sorrows of this world will be no more,[3] God Himself will wipe away every tear we have shed, our grief will turn to eternal joy.[4] The only thing worth having is His love. 

 

---

[1] John 3.16, 

[2] 1Peter 1:8.

[3] John 16:22., cf. Luke 6:21b

[4] Revelation 21.4

   

WHY I'M AGAINST ASSISTED SUICIDE

 “You see, the difficulty with making a decision [for assisted suicide] is that we’re not really sure what tomorrow is going to bring. We make a decision based on the grief of today.” —A quote from me in an interview a number of years ago. See at this link. WHY I'M AGAINST ASSISTED SUICIDE

I had been in an electric wheelchair for many years resulting from three decades with aggressive multiple sclerosis. My MS had moved from exacerbating-remitting to secondary progressive. By all medical wisdom, my prospect was continued degeneration and eventual institutionalization in a nursing home. As I said in the interview, I had no idea what

tomorrow would bring. Three years ago, the Lord raised me out of that wheelchair to stand on legs as thin as popsicle sticks—atrophied from years of being virtually useless. I walked again (albeit with a cane). I still am walking!

Mark

(I am available for interviews, Zoom meetings. Contact email: HumanLifeMatters@shaw.ca)

SHE DID IT FOR THE GLORY OF LOVE

My life has been a love story. LaRee has loved me since we were teens: 52 years ago.  She's been my wife for 48 years, thirty-seven marred by disease and the terror of creeping paralysis. She still loved me when the cold metal bars of my wheelchair tried to scare her love away. There were times when all we had left was each other, broken wings, and a prayer. In my foolishness. I imagined I was a superhero who could defend her honour for the glory of our love. She let me pretend … but the truth was that she was the one who defended a fool's honour even though my body became little more than a living carcass. LaRee did it for the beauty and glory of love. — Mark

Peter Cetera, The Glory of Love

A LOVE THAT IS, THAT IT IS

I read what someone wrote on LinkedIn about the poster above: “God has been God for a very, very long time.” The person meant well, but I think there is a flaw in the writer’s thinking. It’s not that God has been God for a long time, He created time and operates outside of time. God always was. But even this sentence is foolish because the words "always" & "was" acknowledge time and can only make sense within the context of time. 

We cannot comprehend something existing outside of time because a world of time is all we know. In my pea-sized brain, I will make an analogy. Christ's disciple John said God is love. (1John 4:8-9). How much time does love occupy? How much time does an idea or thought occupy? The essence of love, and an idea are not expressed in time, only the thought of love or thinking the thought occupy a tiny span of time. In and of themselves, love, or an idea, transcend time. To ask, "How much time does love occupy?" is a non-sensical question. It is unanswerable. In his remarkable little book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis addressed this: "Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that."

 

In fact, I would go as far as to say, the things that matter most in life exist and operate outside the confines and limits of time. I have lived most of my adult life with serious degenerative disability (MS). The most unanswerable question in terms of my suffering is Why? After 38 years asking that question, I have begun to understand that the answer behind my every Why is the love of Christ. Divine love exists on another dimension that's not governed or subject to time. It is inexpressible, unfathomable. It simply is. I can express it another way: love is that it is. 

When I united my suffering with His salvific suffering on the cross, I discovered that I briefly entered an anteroom of the timeless, too wonderful to endure in my present (or present state) other than for a brief nano-second. In that brief whisper of bliss—which entered a moment in time to be expressed to my time-boundedness—suffering and creeping paralysis no longer mattered. All that mattered was/is God’s divine love.

This Divine love enters time for the sake of our earthly reality to benefit of you and me, but it comes from far beyond us. Its home is eternity which is outside of time. If I analyze it, love in its purest form seems to straddle both time and the timeless. My heart aches because it cannot take it all in—the smallness of my human understanding and my gigantic imperfection is yet incapable in this world, only the next. Then, I will understand just as I'm understood. The Apostle Paul said, "Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” To know and be known transcends time.

There was a sense of an eternal timeless reality—the only reality that ultimately matters—in Jesus' words, “Before Abraham was born, I Am.” (John 5:58) Jesus existed in the essence of the Godhead with and in His Heavenly Father before the world of time and space existed (See John 17.5 & 24). The Incarnation brought Jesus into the world of time and space.  At Christ’s ascension, he stepped back into the timeless reality of eternity, just as all will who have given their lives to Him.

But what do I know, I'm a foolish old man.

MDP

 

DISABILITY INCLUSION: SO FAR AND YET ... SO FAR!

Throughout my life (even before I was disabled with MS) I promoted disability inclusion. Many people have a hard time seeing people with disabilities (particularly visible disabilities or mental disabilities) as equals within normal society. Even progressives who pride themselves as inclusive have difficulty with this concept. They may say they don't, but they do. They make artificial gestures for token examples of disability inclusivity, but I always have a well-founded suspicion they are tokens and artificial. If it was otherwise, Canada would not fund and support assisted suicide by lethal injections for the disabled & terminally ill, while promoting suicide prevention amongst the healthy population. Canada's workforce would naturally tend to mirror the percentage of qualified and ready disabled workers in the population. But it does not. NOT even close!

I've been disabled almost all of my adult life. My children & grandchildren were brought up with disability in the family. They are comfortable with withered limbs and twisted bodies and tools used by people with disabilities such as wheelchairs, adapted vehicles and adapted homes. 

My wife and I taught them to see the person not their disability, to see abilities more than disabilities. That's genuine inclusion. (I've made many mistakes in my life but this was not one of them.) We did it before "inclusion" was a fashionable buzz-word. And I know we succeeded. Look at the photo below of my two granddaughters and me when they were little. Notice one is using one of my wheelchairs—as she often did—as a normal part of play. The other has a doll in a wheelchair. You see, It was as normal & natural as daylight to include disability in their fantastic world of imagination and play.

CHRISTMAS IS A DIVINE IDEA OF LOVE EXPRESSED IN PHYSICAL TERMS

In his 2012 book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives,[1] pope emeritus Benedict XVI explained the significance of Jesus name— prefigured in the Old Testament—first announced by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would bear a son.

“. . .[W]e encounter the name the name “Jesus,” which the Angel assigns to the promised child both in Luke (1:31) and in Matthew 1:(21). concealed within the name of Jesus is the tetragrammation, the mysterious name from Mount Horeb, here expanded into the statement: God saves. The, as it were, “incomplete” name from Sinai is finally spoken. The God who is, is the saving God, now present. The revelation of God's name, which began in the burning Bush, comes to completion in Jesus (cf. Jn 17:26).” 

 

In Jesus, everything is completed, including time, including all creation seen and unseen, including you and me. The author of the Book of Hebrews wrote:

 

“…long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many in various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son whom he appointed heir to all things through whom He created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and exact imprint of God's very being, and He sustains all things by His powerful word.”[2]

 

From the beginning of everything, including time, Jesus was with God and was God. He is the Word.[3] In Him is all glory. Again, Pope Benedict:

 

“the “glory” of God is real, God is glorious, and this is truly the reason for joy: there is truth, there is goodness, there isbeauty. It is there—in God—indestructibilitly.”

 

God loved us unto existence. Human creativity is evidence of the image and likeness of God within every man and woman. The created touches the hem of the Creator when he brings forth beauty out of his imagination. The wellspring of beauty is heaven. Johann Sebastian Bach understood this; he had so often been transfixed by divine beauty and transposed it to music. I believe Bach must have felt the breath of the Holy Spirit within him. How else can we explain Saint Matthew’s Passion, Saint John Passion, or Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring?  Even his secular works carry a hint of the divine. Bach knew his music began from far beyond him. His last words were: “Don’t cry for me. For I go to where music is born.”  And yet as inspired as the music the great man composed is, it still falls short of the glory of God, its goodness, its beauty, its truth. 

 

I have seen that whisper of the divine in nature and in the eyes of a new-born baby. I have felt the whisper of the divine when praying the rosary.  God is the divine idea, inexplicable, intangible yet the ultimate reality. Truth. Love. Beauty. Goodness. People will fight for them and die for them, giving up temporal reality for eternal reality—and we have seen this in young soldiers prepared to lay down their lives for an idea like democracy and freedom, and martyrs prepared to die rather than deny Christ. 

The true joy of Christmas is, at its foundation, a sacred and divine idea expressed in physical terms. The Creator of everything, desiring the return of the only creatures that He gave His Image and likeness—providing a way back to Him when they/we had gone astray. Yes, humanity has become estranged from His love, out of which flows beauty, goodness, and joy. He gave His ultimate gift desiring that we might love Him in return. The incarnation. God made man. Jesus would become the sacrificial lamb that would take away the sins of the world for all those who wanted to be reconciled to God. 

 

To love and be freely loved in return. In the incarnation, God took the terrible risk of love: the possibility of rejection. In Jesus being whipped at the pillar, nails being driven through his wrists into the cross were the rejection of the divine love of God. But wait! In apparent defeat was victory. Millions upon millions of people through the past 2,000 years have believed in God’s Christmas gift and the price Jesus would willingly pay on the cross: victory over sin and its vice-like grip that held/holds people in bondage.  Freedom! Love returned!

 

I pray that this Christmas you will reciprocate to God’s love offered to you by choosing to love Him in return. He offered you the best gift of all. Accept it. Offer God your best gift of all: yourself.

Mark

 

---

[1] Joseph Ratzinger Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, JESUS OF NAZARETH: The Infancy Narratives (New York: Image, 2012) p. 30.

[2] Hebrews 1:1-3a.

[3] John 1:1-4.

THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF CHRISTMAS!

 I read a Christmas Day sermon by early Christian church father, Saint Leo the Great (400-461): 

 

“… In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took for himself our common humanity in order to reconcile it with its creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which he had overthrown mankind.” 

“… Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because of His great love for us He took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins He brought us to life with Christ, so that in Him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off the old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh.”

 

That is the whole point of Christmas! This is where the real joy of Christmas lies for all humanity. This is the real reason to rejoice. Christ is the Christian’s Joie de vivre. 

There is a mystery we see in a baby’s smile, yet unsullied by life’s disappointments and sin; they are still close enough to their mother’s womb and the presence of God they experienced there, even before they took on form.[1]  

 

I am an old man now, but bells of Christmas still call me back to my own simple early childlike joy. So many frosty Canadian Christmas mornings throughout adulthood I awoke to see my wheelchair beside my bed. The cold steel could not steal joy from my soul at the very real presence of the Holy Spirit deep within me (the same Spirit that has warmed the hearts of small children and Christians through the centuries). 

 

Twinkling lights of a Christmas tree greeted me when I whirred in the living room in my electric wheelchair. The violence occurring to my brain could not extinguish the peace in my mind. Christmas joy shone bright deep within me.  For more than three decades, my body slowly became more and more like a corpse with multiple sclerosis, but my soul hummed knowing God has loved me since before I was formed in my mother’s womb. Nothing can separate me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.[2] He came to reconcile with God the likes of sinful people like me.[3]

 

This was the message of Leo the Great’s homily. As he finished his sermon he said: 

“Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. … Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.” 

 

The star of Bethlehem shone through the darkness of night. It gave witness to the Light of the world being born in a dank lowly manger, come to take away the sins of the world, for all who believe in Him. The road from Bethlehem led inexorably to Golgotha. From cradle to cross, Jesus brought a light to mankind. 

 

Another cold Canadian Christmas season is holy and warms my heart. Frigid northern winter night air whispers of hope, forgiveness, and joy to all who will listen with their soul rather than their ears. They will see with their heart rather than their eyes the love of God all around them now and throughout the year. 

 

Beneath a mountain of blankets, I turn in my bed. The wheelchair is gone. My legs are alive once again.  Sleep comes easy in the abiding peace of Christ. 

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight. — Mark 

---

[1] Psalm 139:13-16.

[2] Romans 8:38-39.

[3] John 3:16-21; Romans5:8-9.