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Why,
for what reason, does God love me? Perhaps every human wonders this as they
change, growing in some faculties and losing in others. It’s easy to assume that God and other people
love us for the strongest or best faculty we possess at the moment – maybe
helpfulness or generous service, a strong work-ethic, a quick intellect, or a
kindly spirit. Yet all these can be
stripped away. I’ve seen it happen with
my grandmother these past few years, as her once lively body and good-natured
mind become dull with pain and bitterness.
And I saw it in the “Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in Jean-Dominique’s
frustrations and shifting emotions. Underneath
all these changeable capacities, there must be something deeply true to each
human that God recognizes and loves even when we can’t pinpoint it.
The fact is that I didn’t much like
the character of Jean-Dominique Bauby even when he did have all of his
faculties. I thought he was arrogant and
inconsiderate, too enamored with his own playboy ethos as well as cruel to the
mother of his children, Celine. I don’t
understand why he was surrounded by so many female ‘beauties’ throughout the
movie; it was unrealistic to portray him as having some magnetic pull to
attract these women so desperate to spend time with him. Yet in any case, people did love him and
there was something of God’s grace in that. Even though he had been absent a lot, the
children still kissed and loved him. Even though he could only blink, the
speech therapist and book translator loved him in their own ways too. Hence the movie testifies to the grace of
being loved even when it isn’t deserved and can’t be earned.
As paradoxical as it seems, I
believe that this most passive
faculty – this fact of being loved by God and, by extension, loved by others -
is what makes us who we are. For whereas
I have a hard time letting Jean-Dominique off the hook for being such a cad to
Celine, I know that grace is true when I consider other, more forgiving
cases. For example, I know a family with a baby who died a few weeks after birth. The family grieved and how
they wondered at the unfairness of God in starting his little life just to end
it: What was the point? The baby never did anything at all, couldn’t even manage to pump the blood through his
veins. But at some point in arranging
the funeral, someone suggested to the mom that the baby did have
something, and the one most important thing: the capacity to engender love. For every short minute of that little blue and dying boy’s life, he was
engendering love in the heart of God and all the family gathered around.
In ministry, I find it helpful to
remember that any given person’s essence – whatever makes them who they are, as
a distinct human loved by God - is located on a level deeper than faculties. For if God loves both the dying baby (who couldn’t do anything for himself) and the jerk husband/father like
Jean-Dominique (who did too much for himself), then God must be engaging souls
on a level that I can’t comprehend. It’s
one of those things, yet again, that the intellect, the emotions, the will and
all other perceptive faculties, etc. just can’t touch. And in a sense, I find that freeing - for I
don’t have to know why God loves a given patient; I just have to trust that God
does, and then aim my pastoral love towards that deep, quiet and imperceptible
place in the soul where God sees the fullness of who they are. For God knows each person better than they
know themselves, and certainly much better than I ever could.
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