With Jesus, it was always different. For most of my life, I could only see God the Father through a legalistic filter. But with Jesus, it was always different.
Initially, I saw God as similar to Santa Claus, who “knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake”, controls the bag of blessings and only gives you access to them if you’re good. But while I knew I could fool Santa with a better report card and angelic behaviour on Christmas Eve, I didn’t think I stood a chance with God. He was too big and too perceptive. Who in their right mind would believe that they could gain anything by suggesting to God that He modify His justice, even slightly? The entire moral universe would collapse, just as our solar system would be ruined if any planet changed its orbit, no matter how slightly.
Jesus, on the other hand, was different to God the Father in my perception. He was not on a distant throne, focused on the shortcomings of His inconsistent creatures; He was right in their midst, repairing, healing and teaching—even making jokes (I remember how I felt when discovering that He called the sons of Zebedee “sons of thunder,” as recorded in Mark 3:17). To me, Jesus was always willing to endure people’s injustices and suffer because of them. In my mind, God the Father was the one who made me suffer because of who I am and what I cannot change. It took me too long to begin to understand that the only difference between the image of Jesus I had formed from the Gospels and the image of God I had formed from my own life was found in my own mind. It was my eyes, and nothing else, that saw goodness and sacrifice in one of them, and subjugation to their own immutable perfection in the other. Gaining this understanding cost me a death and a birth, ten years apart.
The Door to Heaven
The loss of my maternal grandmother closed my most precious refuge without asking my permission. I spent most of the joys of my childhood and youth with Grandma, surrounded by the smell of a clean house, sour cherry sponge cake and French face powder. Where Grandma was, there was heaven. Even a house on the outskirts of a provincial town, close to the railway line, had the charm of Eden, where everything is good and predictable, and the worst thing that can happen is having holiday homework.
However, one spring day, heaven came closer for Grandma in the form of a cruel diagnosis. She accepted it with dignity, like a soldier returning home. She began to dream of her parents and siblings, who had died in childhood, and she felt welcome among them. It seemed as if heaven were opening its arms to her, but it was indifferent to me. And that was only right, because God does not do injustice. At the time, it did not occur to me that my perception of myself in God’s eyes might be based not on truth, but on my own pain, past and limitations—in other words, that it was possible for God to judge me differently to how I judged myself. This was to be the last life lesson my grandmother would teach me.
It still seems presumptuous to me to talk about what I learned from my grandmother. Although enough time has passed since then, her amazement at beauty, as she expressed it, overshadows what I think I have managed to adopt. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to revisit that final lesson, as it’s the kind of teaching that becomes part of you once you’ve learned it.
Due to her illness, she had experienced “lows”, and previously, medication had helped her temporarily recover. This time, however, there was not even a glimmer of hope for recovery. However, she was more upset by the idea of becoming a burden to her loved ones than by the illness itself. To me, who counted her sighs, Grandma’s logic made no sense. From my point of view, I would have done anything she needed me to do for her, as long as I still had her for a while. Nothing was too high a price to pay for the privilege of spending time with her. But Grandma didn’t see it that way. She thought she didn’t deserve it, that the effort was too great, and that our sacrifice was too much. Then, I realised that, at least in my case, the saying, “If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else” wasn’t true. For me, it was just the opposite! The fact that I could love someone unconditionally, even if they could only receive and not give, made me believe that I deserved to be loved in the same way. If I could love unconditionally, then unconditional love could exist after all.
Finding the lost treasure
For years, I looked at the love I shared with my grandmother, my mother, and other loved ones for whom time had stopped as if it were a treasure that had once been mine, but was no longer. I believed that I could still look at this treasure in the museum of photographs and memories, but that I would never touch that gold again. (I believed in the resurrection then, but I was not sure about my own). Ten years after that event, when I became a mother, I realised that it is in my power to take the gold back. I could love my little girl with the same love with which I had been loved. In this way, what I had experienced in my childhood could continue. I was no longer on the receiving end, but the giving end. However, that mattered less than the fact that love endures.
Although I still miss Grandma and everyone else, I no longer feel that they are lost. Learning the concept of “unconditional love”, which began with Grandma’s death and continued with the ever-evolving role of parenthood, is a constant source of healing for my soul. I no longer need anyone to convince me that such love is possible. Now that I am certain that this love exists, I realise that the words of Scripture referring to God the Father’s love for humanity have taken on meanings that I could not have imagined before, no matter how hard I tried: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10); “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8); “But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
And 1 Corinthians 15:56, in Eugene Peterson’s beautiful translation, The Message, says it this way: “Death swallowed by triumphant Life! Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who’s afraid of you now?”
Alina Kartman understood that, although it is easy to believe that love is just an illusion, it is deep relationships that prove it is, in fact, a miracle. Through love, we encounter others and God in unexpected places.
