My Father's Love

I am loved beyond comprehension, beyond thought, beyond belief. What are my parents? Love. Love to me. They love that I might “more lovely be.” What have they done? Loved. They show the Father's love to me. And how would I know the Father if I had not known them? He is Father. He gives fathers that we might know the love of the true Father. This is why I have parents, this is why they have me. Love.

My parents are budget-blown lovers; they love me more than the price tag attached to my life. I cost them dearly, but they rejoice to pay the price. I was born, and that was costly. My mother gave of her life to give me life; not a mere sacrifice. My father has forever paid the bills, worked the nights, loved me through his deeds. Who could count the costs? I don't want to know. Grade school, middle school, high school, college, doctors visits, dentist visits, clothes, food... I do know a little. I've seen the doctor's bill. My life is expensive. My brain, alone, is more than I could pay for, and just one of those doctor's visits breaks my bank. I'm too expensive for a luxury. I'm too expensive for anything but love and sacrifice. But who would sacrifice so beyond reason? What is this wild love?

This is the love of God. He is a wild lover. His care and protection go beyond all human love. We try to see, we try to know, but how can we? His love is past finding out. He plans every detail to perfection, and every detail is always right. His love is right. It is not right because I want it, it is right because He sees the whole love story. He knows me from beginning to end, and cares to the point of triviality.

Man would think it disgraceful to love so much, so extravagantly, but God's love is not ashamed of spending itself where it is undeserved, or where it seems unneeded. He delights to see me delight in His world. His world is for my delight. He wants me to love the sparrow. He wants me to delight in its chirping. He plans for the sparrow to be in that tree, over there across the street, and all just so that I can hear him on the way to school. He plans for the mud, soggy shoes, the rain, and my wet hair. These are the insanities of love. He plans for tumors, for cancer, for life and death. But even these are the insanities of love. His love story is perfect. He can't stop thinking about His beloved, planning every detail and laying it all out perfectly. And unlike human love, how unobsessive this makes the beloved. Oh, who am I to receive this love? What have I to glory in? Nothing. I don't understand His love. He spends it freely, lavishly, without any reason. It breaks all haughty spirits. What have I done to deserve this? Love's beauty breaks me. It makes my soul rejoice.

What is love? This is love. Material, tangible, obsessive. He fills my closet with clothes. This is love. What? Love. Unneeded, unnecessary, unexplainable. Love. He fills my mouth with milk and honey, bread and wine. This is love. This is reckless, this is love that would break the budget of any father, any lover; it leaps over chasms, it closes gaps, it knows no bounds. Unbounded and overflowing, His love, that we might more lovely be.

Modesty and Beauty

Over break I picked up A Return To Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, by Wendy Shalit. Little did I know what I was getting into. Despite what you might think from the title, this book is dark, and that's putting it mildly. Shalit is not a Christian, but she wants to use modesty to give girls the happiness "they would otherwise be denied in a culture that has discarded the idea of feminine virtue." Her interest began as a college student who caused an uproar by objecting to coed bathrooms, and she continues to defend modesty by showing how various perversions have caused girls to lose their ability to make sense of their natural feelings. The one section of her book that I did really enjoy was on modesty and beauty. Outside the context of the rest of her book, this section seems a bit sappy, but within the the book, it is a delight and a relief.

Aside from just plain enjoying this story, and getting a good chuckle from it, I find Shalit's presentation of beauty intriguing. Notice how the grandmother's beauty is about her husband, her grandchildren, her family. Her beauty is relational. It has depth and strength. It is more than pure head knowledge, and it is more than skin deep; it is beauty incarnate, tangible and real.

Shalit wants to reserve this beauty for her grandmother alone, but the story reminds me very much of my grandmother, so I won't allow her that. This is the kind of beauty that grandmothers wield, the strongest kind, the kind that takes a lifetime to cultivate.  

Modesty and Beauty

When my grandparents were dating, whenever my grandpa would attempt to hold my grandma's hand at the movies, she always ran away to the bathroom. During one film she could disappear to the bathroom five or six times.

I'm like a 3-year old with this story. Whenever I get discouraged I ask them to tell it to me again: “Tell me the story about how grandpa tried to hold your hand and you kept getting up and going to the bathroom.” I already know the story. In fact, by asking for it I've pretty much told it myself, but I need to hear it told with my grandpa's chuckle. “Your grandmother! She was always escaping to the bathroom!”

A sweet story, you say. Well, thank you. But before you pat me on the head, may I tell you the end of it? My grandparents have a wonderful marriage. Not the kind of marriage one sometimes sees with elderly couples...

I keep returning to this story, to this image of my grandma at 19, running down the aisle of a darkened movies theater, alarmed and excited. The more I reflect on this minor, silly story, the more I come to think that maybe it isn't so silly either. Maybe it's even essential. Maybe the story of this great love between my grandparents comes down to the story of my grandmother's modesty.

Another amazing thing about my grandma is that she is always beautiful. I don't mean subjective beauty, as in, she-is-beautiful-because-she's-my-grandmother, but objectively beautiful. If you weren't related to her I can guarantee that you would be jealous of her. No matter what she is doing, no matter what time of day, with makeup or without, she always has a glow surrounding her, kind of radiating outward and enveloping everyone within a ten-foot radius.

Once when I attempted to explain to someone how beautiful my grandmother was - we were having a class discussion about cosmetic surgery and superficiality - my interlocutor listened patiently, then said quickly, “Yes, yes, I know what you mean, inner beauty's important, too.” But I wasn't talking about inner beauty. I was talking about objective outer beauty, the kind of outer glow which I think must come from knowing what is important. When people have too much plastic surgery they tend to lose their beauty, as if God were punishing them for losing sight of what real beauty is.

My grandma has a golden necklace to go with her golden glow, a necklace made up of ten golden circles. Each circle has the first name of one of her grandchildren, and on the back, his or her birthday. We all love this necklace the best of all her necklaces, and when we were little would clamber all over her to see “where am I on the necklace?” “is this me over here?” “which cousin am I next to?” and “let me see if you got my birthday right.” We all fit together because my grandma was there to connect all of us.

In her world there are words that still mean things, people to depend on and steady you, real things beyond yourself to long for. She doesn't need antidepressants...because she has my grandfather, whom she could always depend on.

Why are none of my grandmother's friends anorexic? Why are even the plumpest of them contented? Joan Jacobs Brumberg recently undertook a very interesting study of girl's diaries in The Body Project, and made the discovery that girls are much more self-conscience about their appearance today then they were a hundred years ago. In the 1890s, she found, a girl scribbled the following New Year's resolution, typical for a young woman at that time: “Resolved,” she wrote. “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.” In the 1990s, a typical diary reads: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can...I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”

...Today the debate over beauty is divided between feminists who say that women are objectified by the male gaze, and their conservative critics who insist that there is no such thing as a beauty myth. Modesty allows us, once again, to step back. There is a beauty myth – to the extent that we have lost sight of what is truly beautiful in women...But if charity, mercy, and grace are all sucked deleted, what remains of womanhood?...Womanhood today is so crude largely because of the attack on female modesty.

I hope I have a grandchildren-necklace someday. But it's very hard to separate the kind of person my grandmother is from the kind of person my grandfather is.