How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight, for the ends of being and ideal grace… I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” (Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Those lines are from one of the most famous poems in English. The second to the last sonnet in the sequence, it builds up to the climax, and the poem’s appeal is that it was a pure and simple expression of Elizabeth’s love for her husband, an equally famous poet, Robert Browning.
Here lies our point for reflection this week, expressing our love for one another in context, i.e., in a way that speaks to the experience of the beloved, and in a way that speaks from our heart and soul.
In today’s Gospel, we have the famous commandment, “Love one another as I love you.” Apropos to this, “As the Father loves me, so I love you.”
Special and personal
Fr. Ronald Holheiser sheds light on it, citing the incident in the Resurrection narrative of the angel telling the women, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead? He is not here, but He has risen.” (Luke 24: 5b-6) Fr. Holheiser comes to the conclusion that each one of us is meant to live in a special and personal way as a continuation of God’s compassion and love in the world, and it is this memory that keeps us alive, long after we are gone.
Our life is a continued presence in the world of God’s compassion and love, which Fr. Holheiser describes as situations in life where our souls are most alive.
If a mother is most animated preparing meals for the family, that is her way of witnessing to God’s love and compassion.
Some have a passion for service and social justice—thus they live life for advocacies that further these causes.
We can think of many other ways or passions through which different persons live life, where they have discovered what it is that “makes their soul sing.” This is the first half of the loving.
Expression of God’s love
The other half is how this responds to a need of others, of the world—how our expression of God’s love and compassion gives others a better chance at life, and makes the world better for others.
Thus, loving brings us back to living life with purpose, meaning and mission. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (“Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC,” Frederick Buechner)
Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all time, went to grammar school at age 7. Behaving in a way that many would label now as having a learning disability or a special need, he was declared by his teacher to be incapable of thinking clearly.
Hearing the comment, Edison burst into tears. Learning of the incident, his mother, Nancy Edison, charged into the school, pulled out her son, and told the teacher that Thomas “had more brains” than his teacher.
Making her soul sing
“Loving, ambitious, and highly capable, Nancy Edison began homeschooling Thomas.” She poured herself into educating her son in a way that our own schools now aspire to duplicate. This was mid-19th century. It was this loving that made her soul sing, and made Thomas discover, too, what it was that would make his soul sing.
Edison would later say, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I have something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”
That’s another example of loving in context. A mother who loved her son in a way that speaks to the experience of her beloved, and in a way that speaks from her heart and soul.
Loving others in a unique way, our way, each one of us is meant to live in a special and personal way, a continuation of God’s compassion and love in the world. We discover this, in its deepest sense, its core, when we discover the Risen Lord who “loved me and gave himself up for me.” (Galatians 2: 20)
We see this love in the people who loved us into excellence, to become the loving person that we are, in the people we try to love and serve, who draw from us the best of our love—not perfect, but the best we can give.
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight, for the ends of being and ideal grace… I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
“Love one another as I love you.” —CONTRIBUTED