Communicating Love and Tenderness
From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters CP
Sunday December 4th 2016
“It can only be to God’s glory for you to treat each other in the same friendly way as Christ treated you.” (2nd Reading today)
Pope Francis told this story that illustrates one of the most important aspects in reaching out to others, trying to bring Jesus to others, especially to our own family and friends: “A young man was suffering from severe depression. He lived with his mother who was a widow and did the laundry for wealthy families. He no longer went to work but lived in an alcoholic haze. His mother couldn’t help him but, before leaving for work, she would simply look at him with great tenderness. Today happily this young man has a position of responsibility and has overcome his problem and all because in the end that look of tenderness from his mother shook him up.” We need to recapture tenderness like that. It can achieve much more than all the scolding and all the lecturing in the world!
This reminded me of a similar story. It’s a story about a mother and her little daughter in Trinidad. They’re poor but the mother takes great care each evening to launder the well worn dress her daughter wears to school every day. Often, as the little girl leaves the front door to set off for school, her mother asks her to stop for a moment and says, “Just stand there. I love looking at you.” This way of looking and loving we call contemplation! We usually think of it as our gazing at God. But we maybe forget that God is gazing at us in the same way that mother gazed at her daughter. Remember St. John Vianney asked an old man in the church how he could pray for such a long time and he replied, “It’s easy! I just look at him and he looks at me.”
Sharing our faith with others is best done by the same loving concern and not by forcing anything, not by arguments and certainly not by condemning them for their lack of faith. Fr. Gerry Hughes, S.J. said about his friend, Professor Donald Nicholl, that he loved conversation but ever since he first met him in 1981, he knew that Donald communicated in a mode beyond speech and words. From his eyes, his smile, his tone of voice, his gentle movements and gestures as well as his words, Donald communicated a sense of awe, wonder and delight in the mystery of life and of God at the heart of it all” I’m sure Jesus did the same. We have so many of the words he spoke and the stories he told but we don’t experience how he told these stories or the expression on his face as he found words to express all that was in his heart and in the heart of God. We are called, all of us, to bring that gaze of Jesus and the joy of the gospel to others. And to do it in the midst of ordinary everyday life. (See ‘Joy of the Gospel’ no.127).