When You Know You're Loved

my mother holding me

In his sermon "On Love,"  John Wesley uses 1 Corinthians 13: 3 to hammer out his conviction that love is the foundation of everything in heaven and earth and that there is nothing we can do that is more important or more pleasing to God than our being filled by love and being guided by it.  In careful sentences and paragraphs he builds his case by posing questions and answering them or by asking rhetorical questions that hold the answer within themselves.  For example, after explaining that we are to love God with our entire being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, he asks:

Now, what is it to love God, but to delight in him, to rejoice in his will, to desire continually to please him, to seek and find our happiness in him, and to thirst day and night for a fuller enjoyment of him?

Then he turns to the question of what it means to love others as ourselves:

For he hath commanded us, not only to love our neighbour, that is, all [women and] men, as ourselves; -- to desire and pursue their happiness as sincerely and steadily as our own, -- but also to love many of his creatures in the strictest sense; to delight in them, to enjoy them: Only in such a manner and measure as we know and feel, not to indispose but to prepare us for the enjoyment of Him. Thus, then, we are called to love God with all our heart.

Wesley states that without love, we cannot live happy lives.  The more anger, malice, envy, fretfulness, or vengefulness we feel, the farther we are from true happiness and contentment, and in fact, John Wesley says, we are already experiencing the presence of "the worm that never dieth" and are hastening our way towards "the fire that can never be quenched."

And then he comes to the point I am most interested in today.  He turns his attention to the painful subject of death and makes these observations.

Secondly. Without love, nothing can make death comfortable.

By comfortable I do not mean stupid, or senseless. I would not say, he died comfortably who died by an apoplexy, or by the shot of a cannon, any more than he who, having his conscience seared, died as unconcerned as the beasts that perish. Neither do I believe you would envy any one the comfort of dying raving mad. But, by a comfortable death, I mean, a calm passage out of life, full of even, rational peace and joy. And such a death, all the acting and all the suffering in the world cannot give, without love.

I was holding my mother's hand when she died what Wesley would have called a "comfortable" or "good" death.  She died in confidence, filled with peace and joy;  she died in "the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ," as the funeral liturgy says. That is not to say that she did not suffer beforehand, nor is it to imply that she was indifferent to the grief we would feel upon her death, but there was no fear, no regret, no looking back in sorrow.  No, there was only love:  hers, ours, and most of all, God's.  She wore a look of intense concentration, almost like a marathon runner intent on reaching the finish line, and so she was.  I believe that she could see something we could not and that she was running with joy towards it rather than slipping away from us with sadness.  I believe that she saw the face of Love itself and that she ran to meet that Love in anticipation of knowing even as she has been fully known, as St. Paul says in that same epistle

Among the last words I spoke to her during those moments were assurances that we would be all right without her because she had shown us how to be all right, that she had taught me how to live and that she was now teaching me how to die, and I meant it even as my heart broke and my voice with it.  I could watch her die a "comfortable" death without trying to tether her to this world with its pain and suffering because Love was in that room.  And when you know that you are loved, when you know that you are in the Spirit's embrace, even death itself has no power over you.  And just as I was safe in my mother's arms in this picture, so she is safe in the arms of Love now, and so shall I be. 

In his hymn "Forth in Thy Name," Charles Wesley expresses in poetry some of what John preaches in this sermon.  The final verse sums up my mother's life -- and her death -- very well.

For thee delightfully employ
whate’er thy bounteous grace hath given;
and run my course with even joy,
and closely walk with thee to heav’n.

And so, in Love, she did.