by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Last Wednesday I finished a Valentine craft with my children, reading to them verses about God’s unconditional love for them. Yesterday I had a heart to heart talk with my daughter in the car about why she could hug me whenever she needed a hug, not when she thought she earned it by good coloring or penmanship. “I love you because you are you, not because of anything you do,” I told her.

Today I look at those hearts, colored beautifully and taped around the largest heart with the words, “God is love,” and today I know those words might ring hollow to 17 parents and families in Florida, who spent their Valentine’s Day mourning the violent loss of children they love as fiercely as I love my own.

“God is love” only makes sense when I remember that God’s love for His children surpasses their love for their children and my love for mine. I must be convinced, as St. Paul is, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). I will repeat this verse to myself when I drop my children off to school in the morning, hugging them just a bit more tightly.

Where is this love when it hurts? The only answer, if I believe that God is love, is that this love hurts WITH us. Five years ago, sitting in church on Sunday still reeling from the news of the Sandy Hook massacre, Fr. Athanasius Farag gave one simple explanation to why such a horrific thing could happen: “because there is evil in the world.”

There is so much evil in the world that when Love came, the world killed Him. “To love is not easy,” Fr. Alexander Schmemman writes, “and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love.” In his book For the Life of the World he continues,

“From its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible. But within this impossibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning.”

I’m not sure there is any darkness more dark than that of a parent losing his or her child. Christ’s mother herself must have experienced this darkness as she looked up to see her Son dying on the cross. And yet she might have known that this End was indeed a Beginning. Fr. Matta El-Meskeen writes, in Guidelines for Prayer, “Christ endured the cross for the joy set before Him, rejoicing in the salvation of men and their reconciliation with the Father.”

Christ willingly suffered pain for our sake because of His love for us. I cannot imagine Him watching idly as the evil in this world continues to cause so much pain. He won’t stop the evil because He will never force us to love Him. But He will feel our pain with us, and if we open the doors to His love even in the darkness of pain, He will give us the joy that “transformed the End into a Beginning.”

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