"Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love."
1 John 4:7-8
“You were within me but I was not within myself.” St. Augustine
My life is not my own motherhood has been teaching me these twenty two years.
There is a quiet, secret looping in the dark.
There is a slowly leaning into the light these long days and nights of laying down a life in the beading moments unnoticed and invisible.
These lives, they were brought through me like so much dazzling light spilling from caverns of mystery and the miraculous.
This incomprehensible will of God in eggs and seeds containing the breadth of generations to come; of all life pushing forward and up and out.
How to lay down this vulnerable heart?
How to embrace the bright and the shadow; the good bye in the hello? Love holding both in its arms, cradling all the same.
How to pray unceasingly in the solitary silence of the heart?
Lay this love down in bits and pieces as the opening to God widens in the giving of love away.
This smudged and fragile, broken and messy heart gradually giving to the moments requiring sacrifice: choosing the good of the other is a trying and a failing; is suffering and joy.
And the days and years, they hum a sanctifying ballad of labor.
Where else would the holy be piecing together a coverlet of grace out of torn rags to warm our frost-bitten selves back to life?
We are growing a filiality in our motherhood; a coming into ourselves where God is waiting, birthing us again and again throughout the infancy of our learning to love; to die to self in a myriad ways: our hands opening over and over receiving this light that overflows into our dark hearts and onto our laps holding children growing us into something better.
This hope, it brightens alongside our being within our true selves and our true selves being within God.
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