God’s love and longing for us are written in the sadness we feel at parting.
I looked up at my friend, who was chatting brightly about the small college where we had both said goodbye to our newly minted freshmen the day before.
Too bad I didn’t feel her enthusiasm. I was mainly feeling the lump in my throat.
Yesterday—the day I had dreaded for months. Years even. My son was not the first child to leave our house, so this should be getting easier, but it wasn’t. Strangely, it was more poignant than ever, even though he was just moving twenty minutes down the road. Our emptying house was quiet like it had never been quiet, with the loss of another singing, yodeling, philosophizing kid.
Then, as my friend continued talking about how wonderful it all was, I noticed the tears slipping down the side of her nose alongside her smile.
In that tragic-comic moment, our conversation shifted as we shared our sadness. The weight that had haunted us all summer, with the dreaded separation hanging over everything, lifted slightly with the sharing.
It wasn’t the first time I spied tears in a friend’s eyes that week at summer’s end. Partings seemed to be on everyone’s minds, whether it was saying goodbye at a dorm door or waving as a kindergartner trotted into school for the first time.
For parents, the smallest of partings are significant. They’re links in a bittersweet chain that pulls our children away from us, even as it draws them toward their potential.
My personal awareness of that chain began with each child’s birth. There came a point, toward the end of pregnancy, when my body ached to give birth, but my spirit wanted to wait, to savor the closeness with the child beneath my heart a while longer before we were separated.
We see the rightness of growth. No one wants their child, no matter how adorable, to stay in diapers forever. But with each parting our hearts break a little. Each goodbye is actually a memento mori, a reminder of the great separation that inevitably awaits us. More than once, friends have used the word “grieving” to describe their feelings as a child leaves home, and maybe that’s why.
Then there are the big goodbyes. As I grappled with the space left by my son’s departure, a tragic death and then another dwarfed my temporary loss. Two families faced unfathomable sorrow. Watching and praying as they walked their Calvaries shrank my own cross to size.
It also accentuated my sadness somehow. My interior dialogue, like my conversation with my friend that morning, went something like this: I’ve raised my child to do just this; he’s in a wonderful place where he will grow in his faith and, God-willing, become the man he is meant to be. Why do I feel so sad?
Not long after we said goodbye to our son, my feelings found expression in a night of fitful dreams. In one of them, I saw him standing by our bed, as had happened through the years when a nightmare—his own or his younger brother’s—sent him to find us, down the stairs and through the dark house.
He was about ten again, a sturdy little figure standing at the foot of the bed, and I woke to the reality that years had passed, and he was grown.
It was one of those dreams that come as the mind is trying to process a loss. I reached for the Rosary beneath my pillow and resigned myself to tossing and turning as I tried to get back to sleep. As I did, I began musing on the mysterious connection that had blessed me with so much joy over the years and was now keeping me awake.
A song came to mind, unbidden: “The love I have for you, my Lord, is only a shadow of your love for me.”
To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of post-Vatican-II musical offerings. Nonetheless, this one, drilled into me by years of Mass in Catholic parochial school, has stayed with me.
If the sentiment in the old song is true, how true as well that our love for our children is insignificant as a shadow, compared to the unfathomable depths of God’s love.
In another sense, parental love, precisely because it is a shadow of God’s love, reveals something about a reality too immense for us to grasp in itself.
We parents play important roles in a shadow play of eschatological proportions. Not only do we model God’s love to our own children, but we ourselves can learn much about divine love from the love-to-the-death we feel for our offspring.
God’s own love and longing for us are written in the sadness our hearts feel at parting.
When we talk about God in terms of human emotion, there are limits, obviously. Theologically speaking, we can’t precisely say God aches for us in the same way we ache for our children when they leave home. Our emotions are a mix of unselfish love and selfish tendencies—there’s no exact parallel in God, in whom there is no incompleteness or imperfection.
Yet God clearly wills to reveal His love for us in terms of human parenthood. When Jesus taught us how to pray, He unhesitatingly said, “Our Father.” St. Paul speaks of the paternity from which “every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:15).
And in Scripture, God reveals a love tender as that of a human mother: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or lack compassion for the son of her womb? Even if she could forget, I will not forget you!” (Is. 49:15). “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you,” God promises in Isaiah. (Is. 66:13)
The word used over and over in Scripture to describe God’s merciful love is the Hebrew word Racham. The word has no exact English counterpart, but has as one of its meanings, “womb.”
In the gospels, Jesus laments over Jerusalem. His words resonate with every mother who has ever worried about her children: “how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings . . .” (Lk. 13:34).
Throughout the busy years of raising children, I considered those words in an active context: the act of comforting a child, nursing a baby, the act of gathering and protecting little ones from harm. In just this way, God comforts, cares, protects.
In a quieter season, I muse on their emotional import. Remembrance. Longing.
In some mysterious way, God aches for each soul just as we ache when our children step further from us. He is the author of those feelings; we can be sure He knows them. And they are beautiful and meaningful because they participate in God’s perfection and reveal it to us.
These thoughts fired my brain and comforted my soul that sleepless night as I pondered how a human parent’s love is like the love of God, albeit in a minuscule way. As my fingers felt the crucifix on my Rosary, I understood: God has been through this. And He knows the ache I’m feeling.
If you’re a parent, the pain you feel when a child leaves home can be a window into the depths of God’s love. We send our kids off to college. He sent His Son to the Cross.
Photo by Bethany Beck on Unsplash
