"Love Persists"

It was a quiet summer supper with my wife, watching this cartoon movie, “Brave.”  A really long time ago there was an ancient and now lost kingdom in which there lived a king, a queen and their strong-willed daughter, who was the princess. The princess gets upset that her mother doesn’t really understand her so she wishes (to a witch) that her mom would change. The problem was that the princess forgot to tell the witch what exactly she wanted her mother to change into, so what she, the mother, changed into was a bear.  The king, husband to the queen and father to the princess, hunted the bear, not understanding of course that this was his wife, the queen.  But, just in the nick of time, the princess discovered that she loved her mom the way she was, so she stitched up the tear she had cut with a sword in the fabric of their family quilt.  As the sun was rising, the princess wraps the bear, her mom, in the restored quilt, thus saving the queen from living her life as a furry bear. The bear is transformed into the mom, now wrapped in nothing but the family quilt, and the princess and her mom and the king share their restored love. The end.

Which left me plenty of time to read Garrison Keillor’s quirky novel, “Pilgrims, A Wobegon Romance.”  Margie loves Carl, her husband of many years, but Carl has lost interest, or so it seems, in Margie.  Margie heads off to Rome on a pilgrimage taken with her neighbors and husband, hoping there to re-kindle Carl’s attraction to her. Margie finds love in all the wrong places.  Until Carl rediscovers Margie.  But is it too late for Carl and Margie?  There the pilgrims are, standing amid the ruins of the Forum in Rome, and one of the pilgrims bemoans the fact, that we all, no matter how glorious our past, will one day just be ashes.  “…(T)he enormity of it stunned him. All your life you strive to accomplish something. Aim for the stars. And for what? For nothing.” But maybe the stars aren’t the thing to aim for, Pilgrim.  Margie and Carl return to the ice-covered streets of Lake Wobegon and there Margie finds what she has been looking for. Not in some wild affair; not in the ruins of ancient civilization, but there, on the icy streets surrounding her plain house which was home, she and Carl found that, really, they did love each other just the way they are. The end.

Which left me thinking about how sometimes we want someone to change and that this will bring us joy and happiness and peace.  But we should be careful what we wish for, because we might get a bear instead of a mom, and then won’t we be sad.  And sometimes we think that if we just could go to some new place, there we will find the love we thought we lost.  But, if we are blessed, we get back home in one piece and find love never left, we were just looking in all the wrong places. The beginning.

Ruined civilizations and broken dreams come and go.  Love persists. That ancient story that never gets too old to tell. Or to experience. And that, Pilgrim, is God’s Story.  Now, go give someone a hug.