Love letting go

Mary learned the hard love of letting go, the love that is forged in surrender to a love that is greater than our own, the love that grows beyond all possessing. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


It is another contradiction: she was there at the beginning, and there at the end with him, yet she had let go.  All good parents learn this letting go, this understanding that our babies have grown into their own adulthood and must be responsible for their own paths. And there is a degree of this in every real love in which we are privileged to participate. Even in the marriage relationship, striving to possess will inevitably stifle the mutual self-giving that is meant to be.

This is the love God has for us, as well.  He has created us, and then leaves us to choose for ourselves what to love, what to embrace, what to choose.  Here he completes his choosing of us, his making of a way for us to always be able to choose him, no matter what choices we may have made previously.  How it must pain him to know that the very best thing for us to choose is to love him in return, and yet in love he makes this way for us without compelling us to choose what he knows is best.

How deep the Father's love for us.