The Thin Curtain by Sherry Antonetti

A dear friend lost her father Saturday.  There are no words for the hole in her heart, in her life. This is an ache that will linger because when we experience the loss of a person, that thin veil between life and death seems impenetrable. We miss and we long and we pine and we hurt..  We know what it is to be living, and we can see our loved ones are gone, and the feeling is so thick in the air, at times it suffocates all else.   What I do know, is her father now knows better than she, how much she loved him.

God is love.  Heaven will be being nestled in that love and really knowing it and returning it fully.  When we lose someone, we pine for that nestled love we could approximate on this Earth.

We know God has prepared a place for each of us when we finally start walking back on the road to home, and that He will kill the fatted calf and host us with the finest bread when we arrive.  God waits eagerly for each of us to seek him, to cooperate with His will, and find our way home. He showers grace on our every day of living to pull us towards Him and on that final day to help us in our littleness.   Those we love who have died, are still even more deeply nestled in love with us than they were on Earth, because they can love us now more perfectly than they could here.   They can pray for us and be part of that road that leads us home, in death and after death more than they could perhaps in life.

The thin curtain that hides our Beloved and our loved ones is there to deepen our faith.  Because we cannot yet love perfectly, we cannot endure yet the scrutiny we would give our own selves if faced with perfect love.  We would fall to our knees like Peter and say "Depart from me, I am a sinful man." if faced with Christ in our midst directly.    We would understand as Mother Teresa did, that we were nothing.  Yet God loves our nothingness.  It is why He calls us to love what we cannot fully see in the form of the Eucharist.  Likewise, the unborn or the dead all invite us to love as God loves, perfectly without recompense, without limits, with our whole hearts.  We do not pierce the thin curtain between life and death or between seen and unseen, but our love like His love, does.

Pray for my friend, for her family and for the repose of the soul of her Father. Pray that all the souls alive and departed eventually seek to be nestled in perfect love.  Not one sheep lost.


Copyright 2010 Sherry Antonetti