The Ways Of Love
By DONALD DeMARCO
Children are not as handicapped as one might think in the ways they can express their love. They are not as restricted as grownups often are by an assortment of stifling rules and regulations. Their innocence and spontaneity give them a certain freedom of expression that is forbidden in the adult world. A friend of mine relates how her own little children surprised her with a moving and memorable image of love they had left for her to discover.
Mommy informed her young ones that she would be on television that day. Arrangements were made so that the children could view their mother in this novel way. Things went according to plan. Back at home, and in some quiet moment, my friend happened to notice something that sent her heart aflutter — the TV screen was covered with lip prints! Nothing she had ever witnessed on her television had ever had such a profound effect on her. What she saw would remain with her for the rest of her life.
Adults, needless to say, would not press their lips against a TV screen to express their affection, no matter how much love they had for the person on display. They simply know better. Or do they? Children are not bound by adult rules. They possess a candor and naturalness that ignores conventional attitudes. As a result, their message journeyed from a TV screen to a sanctuary. This is not a conventional route, but one, we might say, that is super-conventional. The lip prints that decorated the TV screen, in being relocated to the mother’s heart, found a lasting dwelling place.
The American novelist William Makepeace Thackeray once remarked: “Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of little children.” He recognized the exalted affection that a child has for his mother, one that time will continue to modify.
A kiss does not last very long and is often highly ambiguous. We are told in the hit song from the movie Casablanca, As Time Goes By, that “You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss.” The kiss planted on the TV screen, however, would last a lifetime. In this case, the spontaneity of the child wins over the practicality of the adult.
I imagine that there was a moment when the happy, and probably tearful, mother needed to clean the TV screen and return it to the adult world. She may have hesitated. And then she might have said to herself, “I have these precious images of my children’s affection locked permanently in my heart. I no longer need to keep them on the screen.”
On the other hand, we can be certain, regarding a comparable and unusual transfer of love, that when St. Veronica received the image of Christ’s face on her veil, she had no inclination whatsoever to erase it. Also, Christ had left an imprint of his visage that would be further immortalized in poetry, painting, and music. The name “Veronica” derives from vera, meaning “true,” and icon, meaning “image.” St. Veronica had stepped out of line along the Via Crucis, but received an expression of love that has survived time. Love finds ways of traveling along unconventional routes.
My father passed away in 2007. During his interment at Notre Dame Cemetery in Fall River, Mass., his great-granddaughter, who was named after her great-grandmother, stepped out of line and proceeded to pick dandelions. She then presented her bouquet to her 102-year-old namesake who, not wearing her spectacles, mistook it for something more precious. For the three-year-old Marion, a cemetery is not a cemetery but an Elysian field where beautiful flowers bloom. Nor, in her view, are dandelions weeds, but exotic flowers. Rules and rituals are for grownups. Life unfettered belongs to the child. The dandelions were emissaries of love and received in exactly that manner.
I do not want to idealize children. They can be demanding, uncooperative, and exhausting. But they instinctively understand the truths of fairy tales that a kiss can change a frog into a prince, and that dragons can be slain.
“If you want your children to be intelligent,” advised no less an intellectual than Albert Einstein, “then read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
In his The Ethics of Elfland, G.K. Chesterton acknowledges that his first and final philosophy was the one he learned in the nursery. The great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, is that “a thing must be loved before it is lovable.” “The things I believe most now,” he professes, “are the things called fairy tales.”
When people were bringing children to Jesus so that He could place His hands on them, the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:14). “Pure, holy simplicity,” St. Francis of Assisi tells us, confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.”
Heaven is a place where there are no obstacles placed in the path of love. It is a place where people who have the heart of a child are free to love each other uninhibitedly. It is a restoration of that realm intimated by William Wordsworth where “every common sight” was “appareled in celestial light.”
- + + (Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review and is the author of 39 books. He is a former corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy of Life. Some of his latest books, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, and Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World are posted on amazon.com. He and his wife, Mary, have five children and thirteen grandchildren. Restoring Philosophy and Returning to Common Sense is now available.)
