Where is Love When Love Runs Away?

Last night I had one of those really good conversations with our younger daughter in the last row of a now empty auditorium.   Her husband and their two daughters sat across the room with the part of the audience that stayed to learn origami after a film on the subject.  We fall easily into deep talk, our children and I.  Perhaps it is because of a life lived with that question, the “How are you?” question, that their hearts’ doors are so easily opened, their treasures of discovery and doubt so easily shared. 

From time to time Nadia and Sonja would run up the aisle from the stage to the seats where she and I sat talking, to ask her favorite color, or to report on their progress.  My saying that they would “run” is like saying a sunset is “pretty”.  Language fails to describe the joy of it, the lightness of their translocation between stage and mother.  It is as if their smiles lifted them like wings, their lithe bodies almost floating across the distance, feet dangling and bumping the floor as they flew.  And when they flew to the stage, there they were, over there.  Here she was, not so far away, but not there, where they were.  

“Love”, came her voice, from deep in her place of treasure, mellow and rich like the reedy tongue-curled vibration that grows to a rich sound-sauce as it passes through the curves of a baritone sax; “Love runs to me, and runs away; love comes, and love goes.”  Sure enough, I reflect now, eight hours later, like the husband remembering his wife’s birthday the morning after: she has become her mother. 

We are here, Kathy and I, because when we were living there in Detroit, the grandkids were up here, in Traverse City, which is now the here we share with them.  I think that perhaps men have it easier, or maybe it’s non-mothers, or maybe just me.  In what was perhaps the essential scene of a film I watched awhile ago, the wandering husband returns to his wife in tears, saying that he loved her.  She looked at him with eyes that spoke the words before her tongue: “You don’t love me; you love the idea of me.” 

When love runs away, you see, I am, in my self-centeredness, comforted by the idea of the love, the scent of love that remains, a residue on all that I have.  I don’t know where myself leaves off and Kathy begins, right here in my skin.  my skin, and there’s the rub, the solipsism, the “there is only me” pill that many of us – men, non moms, or perhaps just I – have taken that takes away the pain that women, or mothers, or maybe just Amy and Kathy feel (though I doubt it).  I look at the world through beloved eyes, and find Kathy’s love and our children’s with me in all that I see.  The same is true, though in undertones, of the love of my parents, siblings, and friends.  I am as I am because of their love, which is there love, not here love.

We are discovering planets these days, you know, around the distant stars, before they see them.  We do it by noticing the way the stars move, pulled in their stability by the tiny things that orbit them.  We do the math and look where the source of that tiny pull comes from, and yup, sure enough, there it is, the dot we would never have found except for the pull that it has.  Maybe that’s reason enough to look in the sky for God.  We need to know where the love is, the love that pulls on us when love runs away.  We need a Love that remains here, even and especially when love runs away.  A song comes to mind, a plea to God, Bach's aria "Bist du bei mir" ("Be Thou with me").  (Click for a link.)  Enjoy.  Hear here!

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.