Quality of Love

When I became pregnant, I learned that veteran parents talk to parents-to-be almost exclusively in clichés: “Sleep while you can”; “Your life is about to change forever”; “Enjoy every moment.” All of these are well-meaning, and annoying. The one that always baffled me, however, was “You don’t know how much you can love someone until you become a parent.” I heard this more than once from family members and parishioners, and I flat out refused to believe it. I refused to believe that the love known in marriage — the love that grows and changes and blossoms and fades and flourishes over the course of 50 years — isn’t, in fact, all it is cracked up to be.

Were people really saying that I was going to love my baby more than my husband, her father? And what about my love for God? As a priest, I taught, talked, and thought about love all the time. Love is the heart of all that lives and moves and has its being. Loving God is our highest calling, the whole reason we exist. Did these people really expect me to admit, out loud, that I was going to love my baby more than I loved my Creator and Savior? Did they expect me to believe that God would withhold a certain amount of love from those who, by choice or chance, had no children?

When my daughter Ridley was born, I got some idea of what they were getting at. I don’t love Ridley more than I love my husband or Jesus, but I love her differently. It isn’t a matter of more or less; it is a difference in quality and kind. The day she was born I knew, in an instant, that this was the one person in the world that I would not hesitate to die for: without question, without hesitation, without a second thought. This is not because I suddenly gained capacity to love, or I’d never met someone else who I loved enough, but because it is who I am, and who she is to me. It is a fierce, hungry, borderline dangerous love not rooted in anything Ridley has done, or could do. It isn’t a love I generate from within myself as I try to love her better and be a better mother. It comes from my being. My existence and encounter in this world changed the minute she came into it.

This hit me particularly hard when I preached on Mary at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday, when Ridley was just 12 weeks old. I’ve always been moved by the Stabat Mater, but that Good Friday I felt in my bones, for the first time, that Mary would have climbed onto the cross herself; without question, without hesitation, without a second thought, if it meant that she could save her son.

Each disaster, tragedy, and cruelty I see in the world now affects me differently since becoming a parent. I was in college when the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, and I spent weeks thinking about them — girls just a few years younger than me. I had nightmares about what was happening to them, and I prayed for their return. Almost 10 years later, I still think about them and pray for them and wonder where they are now.

But since having Ridley, I no longer just think about those kidnapped girls; I also think about their mothers. Reading a news story about a missing or injured child is no longer a moral, intellectual, and emotional tragedy; it is one I feel in my body. I can’t read about a war, kidnapping, murder or plague without thinking about my baby, her little body, and her sweet smile. I feel, in a way I can’t totally explain, a minute dose of the anguish that mothers all around the world feel when their children are suffering, scared, or in danger.

I recently read an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Mayyan Zin, an Israeli woman whose two daughters were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, and are held hostage in Gaza. Her piece is heartbreaking and powerful. She writes:

I have nothing left to ask of this world but this: Take me to my girls. Take me to Gaza. I am requesting assistance from the Israeli government, the U.S. government, the International Committee of the Red Cross and any other organization trying to help the hostages. I cannot wait for more news of hostage deals to come and go. You have failed to free my girls, so take me to Gaza.

Before having Ridley, I would have been moved by Mayyan’s words, felt sad, and felt for her loss and worry about her daughters. But I also would have assumed — without malice, but with naïveté — that her plea to be taken into Hamas-controlled Gaza was a well-chosen and rhetorically powerful illustration of her passion. But having a child of my own changes everything. Reading her words now, I know deep in my bones that she is as serious, and is speaking as literally, as anyone has ever been or spoken about anything. Given the chance, she would willingly walk right into the midst of the people who killed her daughters’ father and 1,200 others with impunity and sickening glee. I have no doubt that she would accept certain death, if it meant she could free her girls. Without question, without hesitation, without second thought, Mayyan would go to Gaza. Because that is who she is. That is the quality of her love.

Having a child didn’t show me how much I could love another person, but it did change my experience and understanding of God’s love for this terribly broken world. The quantity of God’s love for us is infinite, and we will never be able to comprehend it, in this age or the age to come. But I now have a taste, a hint, a shadow, of the quality of that love. When John says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1), I don’t think he is talking about the amount of love, but the type: a desperate, dangerous love that comes from God’s very being: the love of a parent who would give everything in the world, even to the point of death, to bring his children home.

Which is, of course, what the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection is. God looks at the world he has made, a world where children are kidnapped and murdered, where wars rage, where violence is perpetrated with impunity, and says: “Take me to them. I am going to bring them back.”

The astounding thing about the mother of Jesus standing at the foot of the cross is that this quality of love flows in both directions. Mary could have begged to take her son’s place on the cross, just as Mayyan begs to be taken to Gaza. But the mystery of mysteries is this: while Mary loves Jesus as a son, he loves her not just as a mother, but as his creation — as a human being made after his own image, made to dwell with him in the love he shares with his Father, a love that cannot bear to give his creatures up to sin and death. This love is like the love parents have for their children, but deeper and broader and richer and fiercer than anything we could know in this life.

And when the world is terribly dark, this is what I hold onto. I pray for Mayyan and her daughters, pray that God will bring them back together, that he will stir up his power and break the chains of war, hate, sin, and violence. I hold my baby girl and thank God for her. I pray for the mothers and fathers lying awake at night all around the world, parents with empty arms longing for their children, wondering where their children are, or missing those they have lost. And I know, deep in my bones, that a fierce, determined, dangerous love is at the very heart of God; that he will, in the last day, dry every eye and bind up every wound; that he will come to bring us back.