The vulnerability of parental love

For my morning prayer time this year, I have been using a book I found in a discard pile: An Ignatian Book of Days. Put together by Jim Manney, the book consists of curated meditations for each day of the year. This book has been a boon for my spiritual life.

As a husband and as a father, one who, along with my wife, has been going through our most challenging time in more than thirty years of parenting the past year-and-a-half (I will spare you the details and safeguard my child's privacy), I was particularly struck by the extended extract from another book, written by Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows: Essence of Prayer, that was today's meditation from An Ignatian Book of Days.

I am not sure that consoling is the best word to describe the effect of what Burrows wrote had on me. I would have to go with hopeful. As longtime readers know, I have a very specific take on hope.

Consider a blissfully happy couple finding all they need in one another. For no other reason than generosity and the desire to share their happiness, they decide to adopt children as their own. From then on their life undergoes a profound change. Now they are vulnerable, their happiness is wrapped in the welfare of the children; things can never be the same again.

If the children choose to alienate themselves and start on the path to ruin, the couple are stricken, They will plead, humble themselves, make huge sacrifices go out of themselves to get their loved ones to understand that the home is still their home, that the love they have been given is unchanging.

This perhaps gives us some insight into redemption. In a mystery we cannot fathom, God "empties," "loses" Himself in bringing back to Himself His estranged, lost children. And this is all the Father wants. This is the only remedy for Hs wound. God is no longer pure God, but always God-with-humanity-in-his-heart

On a theological note, the Incarnation requires you dump your Aristotelianism and your Platonism as it pertains to God. As Paschal learned, the God of the philosophers is not the saving God, the God of redemption and liberation, God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

It is, of course, through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that, in baptism, we become children of God by adoption (the Father has only one begotten child, a Son).

As parents of six children, my wife and I have experienced our share of ups and downs, joys and sorrows, consolations and desolations. We haven't dealt anything of the magnitude of what we are currently enmeshed in. "Now they are vulnerable." Indeed, and, yes, thank God for that.

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy,
through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, . . .

While I am not one of those who thinks spiritual truths need to validated empirically and scientifically (I am more one who is like, "Duh, of course these bear out empirically!"), here is an article that I found useful: "The Good Kind of Vulnerability."