The Sacrifice of Loving God with All One’s Heart

In today’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus warmly commends the scribe who approaches Him to affirm that loving God “with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  To love God with all one’s heart---what a sacrifice!  And one’s neighbor as oneself---what a sacrifice!  What a wonder that Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman chose as his episcopal motto, Cor ad Cor Loquitur:  Heart Speaks to Heart. 

For meditation on Christ’s teaching about the sacrifice of loving God with all of one’s heart, I share with you a beautifully profound reflection from the heart of one of my dearest friends, Lisa Lickona, whom I first met during our college days at Notre Dame.  Together with her husband Mark and nine children, she lives on Red Rose Farm in upstate New York and is a regular contributor to Magnifcat.  She spoke these words of remembrance at the funeral luncheon for her father, James Gabany.  So from Christ’s heart, to James’ heart, to Lisa’s heart, to my heart, to your heart . . . all the way back to Christ’s heart:  

James A. Gabany

+February 28, 2013

Over eleven years ago my father experienced his first congestive heart failure.  I was with him that night here in Latrobe hospital.  The doctors did not know what was wrong with him at first; and, as he lay on the bed struggling to breathe, he told me that he thought he might be dying.  I went home that night, back to his house, and lay in bed quite afraid.  As you can see, he survived that event, and went on to experience congestive heart failure 10 more times.  He told me about two months ago that he had recently asked his doctor what the record for the number of congestive heart failures was.  “He wouldn’t answer,” my dad said, “what do you think that meant?”  “Well, Dad,” I answered, “that probably meant that you hold the record!”  We both laughed.

I am sure my dad held the record.  My father did many things very well.  He built the house I grew up in.  He made the lake we swam in.  He was, we know now because we have been through his papers, a mechanical engineer who kept receiving awards for excellence.  He retired---and then kept going: he worked as a courier for the Tribune Review, had a stint as a realtor and took up golf.  He got a bread machine and studied up on how to make the best, most healthy bread.  He bet on the Steelers and, in a conversation about a year and a half ago, shared with me how he had made a science of it.  He was a gambler like his own father, but his proclivity to gamble was turned toward the stock market.  And he was very good at making money in the stock market.  After his first heart attack he had made a study of the best diets. He tried each one in turn—low cholesterol, low sugar, flax seed, nuts. He kept track of which ones worked the best to keep his cholesterol low.  And that was the one he followed.  And obviously it worked.

That’s just how my dad was—smart, diligent, determined.  He did many things well.  But that night eleven years ago, when I thought my father was dying, I lay there with the most awful ambiguous feelings.  Even though I loved and respected my father, there was one way in which I felt he had failed.  And that was that he had failed to reconcile with my mother.

But, as they say, life is very long.  The ancient Greeks pictured life as a thread that was spun by one of the Fates, measured out by another, and cut by a third.  Dad’s thread was pretty long and, if the third Fate had been poised to cut the thread that night, something had stayed her hand.   Dad’s life went on and my life went on.  And so I had much time to think about this situation, to reflect on it. 

One of the things about being middle-aged—right now I am forty three and a half, exactly half the age of my father—is that you start to see things in new ways.  You realize that everyone makes mistakes—sins we would call them.  We are all sinners, every one of us.  And not only have we all made choices that we regret, but we have all suffered many times over from the choices of others—our friends, our spouses, our parents, their parents.  At mid-life, life starts to look less like a neat thread that has been meticulously measured out and more like a tangled bunch of yarn after the cats have gotten into it---a mess of choices that we cannot sort out.  That is why it is very tempting to want to begin again, to cut the thread oneself and start over.

But what is actually needed is someone to untie the knots---someone who has the patience to quietly sit and carefully follow the twisted threads to where they begin; to do the work with our life that seems impossible to us; to sort it all out; to make sense of the mess.  And there is someone who can do it:  A few years ago when I was first starting to see the mess that my own life is, I stumbled upon a beautiful website with the picture of a woman who has a length of thread in her hand and is diligently and lovingly untying it.  Beneath her feet a hapless snake is being crushed.  The title of the painting is “Maria, Knotenlöserin”—in English, “Mary, Untier of Knots.”   If the Greeks had the placid Fates to measure our lives, we Christians have a loving Mother who untangles the messes that they become.

But if Mary is the untier of knots, the one who can work on sorting out the mess, then what is left for us to do?  Well, when one has a tangled ball of yarn that needs to be untangled, where does one start?  By looking for an end.  Our humble job in life is to not hide the ends of the yarn.  What we are most tempted to do is to hide the messy ends, to tuck them deep down inside--to pretend that we have it all worked out, that we know all the answers, that we don’t need anyone’s help.  But what we actually need to do is keep looking, keep admitting fault, keep trying to get help.  And these things are what a life of faith is about.  Faith is not a smug position in which one sits, knowing all the answers.  On the contrary, a life of faith is a life lived believing that the answers are not within oneself, that someone else will make sense of everything, that in Him is Truth, and Goodness and all Beauty.  A person living by faith is always trying to be better, despite his limitations—and by “be better,” I mean learning to trust better, learning to love better.  Because that gives God a chance.

And whatever else one may say about my father, James Gabany, he did live in this way.  About a month ago, when my dad was in rehab for the second time, I had a conversation with him in which he kept saying “I don’t know, I don’t know.”  What didn’t he know?  I think that he did not know what to do.  He was always a doer, always found a way to work through things.  But, weakened and confused from his poorly functioning heart, he did not know what to do.  He could not get up by himself.  He could not exercise.  He could not read.  He could not do much of anything.  He couldn’t even think straight.  When I talked to him, he was very upset.  I suggested that he just pray. “I can’t even remember the words of the Our Father,” he said.  “All I can remember is that one prayer: ‘Eternal rest grant unto them and let perpetual light shine upon them.  May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.’”  It was the prayer for the souls in purgatory.  “That must be the prayer you are meant to say, Dad,” I told him. 

A couple days later I called again.  Dad sounded much more up.  He must have felt better, I thought.  “How are you,” I asked.  “Well, Lisa”, he said,  “I’ve decided to change my attitude.  I had a conversation with my roommate here, a young guy, and he told me that fighting it will only take me longer to get better.  And so I’ve decided to begin every day with a prayer to Genevieve, the patron saint of our family.”  [Genevieve is Lisa and her husband Mark’s daughter, born with Down Syndrome, who died in infancy and who continues to live in Christ and share her gifts, apparently here with her Grandpa.]  I knew that he wanted to be better than he was.  My dad was always trying to be better. 

At the very end, in the last hour of his life, his heart was failing and he was in great distress.  My sister Christie was there.  She told me he kept saying two things: “Lord, help me” and “Grant me a clean and pure heart.”  As my father’s human heart was dying, he was asking for a new heart, a heart not made of flesh.  A heart of faith.  And that is, I believe, what he will be given. That is the end of the string—that is all God needs to work with. I am sure that when my dad died, God sent Mary straight to work to untie all the knots.  Maybe that is one way to think about purgatory—as the place where the messes of our lives get untangled.  At any rate, that is what I am praying for for my dad.  Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us!