Love in Action - Submitted by Catherine Barnsley, dear friend of QHP
Love in Action
When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, "It looks like the end of the world."
What you’re seeing is love in action.
What you’re seeing in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, our parents, our brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet.
People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives.
All the more reason to take a moment,
when you’re out on your walk,
or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love.
Let it fill you and sustain you.
It isn’t the end of the world.
It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness".
- Belfast, Ireland COVID team
When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, "It looks like the end of the world."
What you’re seeing is love in action.
What you’re seeing in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, our parents, our brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet.
People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives.
All the more reason to take a moment,
when you’re out on your walk,
or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love.
Let it fill you and sustain you.
It isn’t the end of the world.
It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness".
- Belfast, Ireland COVID team
This marvelous photo speaks to me deeply, as well as the meaningful words which you have sent, The trees and branches stand alone and yet are intertwined with one another - just as we are intertwining in love, each in our own way, even while we stand alone.
ReplyDeleteAnd talk about resurrection! The circle of light streaming out in unbelievable rays of color, falling majestically on leaves and bare branches alike ..... penetrating each of us with resurrection life,
each called to rise in love where we are planted.
This verse and the luminous picture of the light in the trees reminded me so much of what Teilhard de Chardin once said in to a group of colleagues. It was New Year’s Eve 1932. “Probably, for not one of us here does God mean, or seem, the same thing as for any other of us.” But he went on to pray, “What we ask of that universal presence which envelops us all, is first to unite us, as in a shared, living, center with those whom we love, those who so far away from us here, are themselves beginning this same new year.”
ReplyDeleteThe wider and deeper the expanse of this pandemic becomes, the more we come to realize the the essential universal connection -- the Presence that enfolds us and the Love that hold us. We truly are One Body the world over.