Love's Hospice

A Meditation for November 2004

All Saints Sunday in November is an occasion to acknowledge that no life experience touches us so universally as does death and dying. At whatever age we lose a loved one, we long for the comfort of a caring community of faith and the assurance that love never ends. Nowhere is our faith tested as much as it is when we must deal with the reality of death and dying. Yet at no time are the promises of God more real than when we are able to trust those we love to God’s care and keeping.

Then each of us must deal with our own mortality, sooner or later. As we come to accept death as a part of our living, we are helped in the remembrance of those who have gone before us. Others have passed through this dark valley. We are better able to accept the inevitability of our own death when faith and hope are renewed for the journey.

Life in its fullness is appreciated, received, when the gift of love can be embraced. By receiving divine love and by giving love back in each human relationship, we are brought to God and we bring God to others. With love the last days of the journey home will be filled with God’s promised peace.

By God’s grace, we may take our leave with love.

Love’s Hospice

Center your heart on the highest gifts and I will show you the way home.

If I speak now with words to eulogize or to trace a godly heritage, but speak of mortality without love, I will sound a death knell and voice no heavenly hope.

And if I have power to predict immortality and to understand the sweet mystery of life and death and to answer all the ultimate questions;

And if, by faith, every mounting doubt is conquered and every regret is removed, but I embrace such wisdom and faith without love, I am left with nothing in the final equation.

If I spend my last breath serving others, and look back on my years as an offering to God, but know that life has been poured out without love, I must acknowledge that I have gained nothing that is eternal.

Love in one’s last hours waits patiently for that bright appearing and is gentle going into that dark night; it does not covet the lot of the living nor does it storm heaven’s gates.

Love at death’s door insists only that love’s way be affirmed; it is not irritated with its adversaries nor resentful of its helpers; it does not complain but rejoices in all that has been and says yes to all that is to come.

Love in the twilight bears up, shares the burden of separation; upholds, believes in the words of eternal life; enables, hopes for every promise’s fulfillment; embraces, endures all demands to the very end.

Love itself never ends. As for our visions of heaven, they shall fade; as for earthly wisdom, it shall cease; as for certainty of our destiny, it will prove unnecessary.

For what we know is always incomplete and our speculation about the future life is only a guess or a gesture; but when life in its fullness and perfection dawns, the imperfect need no longer satisfy us.

When I began life with a child’s eyes on heaven, I spoke as a child, of a heavenly father; I thought as a child, of lambs in a shepherd’s arms; I reasoned as a child, of a mother hen with her brood. When I came to more mature years, I gave up such simple ways of speaking and thinking and reasoning.

But now we are looking beyond these dim reflections of reality and are coming to view life and the Life-Giver face to face. Once we knew God in a partial way, but now we know God in God’s fullness, even as God has always known us.

So faith that brings heaven’s joys near to us, hope that dwells on that distant shore, and love that brings God to us; these three abide, always, but the greatest of these is the love that brings us to God.

Take leave with love.

(Permission is given to reproduce, with source acknowledged.)
From Love’s Letters: A Poetic Book of Confessions by George Gunn
(Library Lane Press / Copyright 2001)