The Fruit of Love

Love is dynamic: it is always in motion, always impacting, always expanding. It cannot be contained! A sure sign that a family is loving in word and deed is that they don’t just love each other: they reach outside of their home and love those around them. Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it this way, “The fruit of love is service.” This service to God’s family will necessarily take you beyond your comfort zone, beyond where you’d travel if it was just about you and yours. Service, empowered by love, will be inclusive, because God’s love is inclusive and it is He Who is ultimately loving through us.

I recall that a tradition of my family growing up was to adopt a family at Christmas time through our Church. My mother would always organize this event, and I admit that at the time I didn’t grasp the full significance of this annual ritual. Frankly, at 46 years-old I’m still processing the meaning: love, and the fruit it bears, is a great mystery. The first few years, I mostly experienced our adopt-a-family project as a disruption to my weekend plans. After all, this process took a little time, asked me to get outside myself for a few hours, and didn’t seem to provide any tangible benefits…not terribly compelling for a typical teenager. We’d all go shopping for food and toys as a family, and then deliver the goods to our church where someone else would drive the gifts to the adopted family. But one December my mother, God bless her, decided we were going to deliver this taste of Christmas in person…as a family. I remembered feeling uneasy as we drove up to a dimly lit apartment building, in a neighborhood I had never ventured anywhere close to. A cheerful mother answered the door and invited us in. Before the rest of us could think of an excuse, my mother was saying thank you and moving through the threshold. There were at least ten people in this little two-bedroom apartment, a mix of children and adults: three generations of family sharing a new start in a foreign land. I couldn’t believe how crowded it all seemed, and how happy these beautiful souls appeared.
When I arrived back home that night, I sat in my room reflecting on the life that surrounded me…all the goodness and blessing…and it looked a little different. Like tectonic plates moving miles below the surface of the earth, slowly reverberating up until an earthquake is eventually experienced at ground level, the impact of that evening took time to consciously reach me, but I still feel the impact today some twenty-five years later. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.” That direction needs to eventually be outward.

We need to be of service to those outside our own families. We need to learn to give to those less fortunate then we are, not because of their poverty but because of ours. God understands perfectly our tendencies to become too self-involved, too insulated from the larger family of humankind, too self-congratulatory in our private realities. This society we are a part of has become alarmingly divided, splintered, alienated: we have too often forgotten who we are and who we are meant to be. This is why He calls us to action.

The family that truly loves will follow the lead of Love right out the front door of the home, and into the big wide world. It will love in the spirit of the Good Samaritan, who sacrificed for his neighbor even when his neighbor was supposedly a sworn enemy. It will love in the spirit of the religious family of the Sisters of Charity around the world, who like their little Albanian foundress find people of all religions and races in muddy gutters, and dark alleys, and all kinds of wretched squalor, and joyfully care for them. And it will love in the spirit of my mother, who challenged her family time and again to move beyond the limits of comfort toward greater meaning and purpose.

Happy Valentine's Day....let's try to live the spirit of the day in word and deed all year round!