Frame of Love

After he retired, my father started painting. He’d always been a lover of art, and Mom was never surprised when he’d gone out of town for a conference and come home with a new painting to hang on the walls. Fortuitously, I inherited a Pascal Cucaro abstract Dad brought home from a meeting in San Francisco.

Matted in purple-velvet tucked into a multi-dimensional wooden frame, I see an Easter parade in its 25 x 36 canvas, its characters dressed in vivid blues, pinks, purples, oranges and yellows. Overhead, banners and crosses gracefully blow in the breeze above the crowd moving together through the street. Cucaro had a gift for painting uplifting and soulful scenes in what’s called his People-People genre.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, we find Jesus talking to the crowd, pointing out love of God and neighbor as the two Greatest Commandments, the frame for living out the Ten Commandments (Mk 12:29-31; Ex 20:3-17). Mind, body and soul we are called to devote all to loving. Why? Because, as Blessed Fulton Sheen says, “loving God means loving what is best for ourselves” (The Divine Romance, 27).

Love is not a selfish act of getting what we want and consider best for us. No. Our wants jump from moment to moment as we set eyes on that which seems grander than what we already have. Love involves sacrifice, giving of ourselves, going out of our way for others, mercy, forgiveness, and all those ideals that sound highfalutin when spoken with the intent to condemn, but are truly gentle and caring whispers when meant only to accept another as brother and sister.

The “I forgive you” from the voice of one with arms outstretched to us is love in action. The act of accepting forgiveness brings forth the best in the offended and the offender alike.

Love is an act of unity that brings us into one with each other and with God. “Love is ‘divine’ because it comes from God and unites us to God;” according to Pope Benedict XVI, who adds, “through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one” (God Is Love, Encyclical Letter, 23). One family, all children of God.

Our gifts differ as do our situations, dreams, tastes, and goals for our time on earth. That is part of the beauty of this kingdom God has bestowed on us.

I look closer at Cucaro’s painting and focus on individual faces. Even though he meant them to be hazy, each is unique. The chin lines, colors, hair, length and breadth of them differ. Yet they walk in concert, framed in a common purpose which I choose to interpret as an Easter parade!

And so I pray: Dear Lord, help us to see through the haze of our shallow desires into the clarity of Your abiding love. Help as walk as one united in love to You.