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A lady I know died this week. She was a parishioner at the church in which I, my mother, grandfather, and great-grandmother grew up. She was frequently one of the last to remain after mass ended, exchanging friendly words just outside or inside, depending on the season, of the doors to our little brick church with the other gray-haired stalwarts leaning on canes. She always had a compliment prepared, especially for us kids, and her words always seemed sincere. She was always smiling.
My cousin, in her early thirties and with small children, posted on Facebook, the center of small town social interaction, a memorial to the deceased lady. My cousin noted her appreciation for the care and affection shown to her children by our church family. In reading this, I lamented that my kids would never know and feel the love from the old men and women of St. Elizabeth as I had. These people so important in my childhood formation would only be scratches on granite slabs in the cemetery overlooking the valley. I wondered if my kids would ever even stop to read their names. I assumed that my children could never know these people whose love laid the cornerstones of the village that raised me. It was then that I had a revelation about love.
When I was a kid, my grandfather - hereafter Papaw - taught me how to skip rocks. We’d go down to the creekbed, find us a good, flat rock, and with just the right flick of the wrist, we’d send that thing skipping across the water. If you were good at it, like Papaw was, you could send the rock clear to the other bank, with half a dozen jumps or so skillfully executed in between. As a kid, I was more concerned with making a splash, so I’d find myself something big, too big to skip, and throw it in the creek to send water as high as I could. I didn’t understand the delicate elegance of Papaw’s skipping then. None of my rocks ever made it to the other side.
There’s been enough written about what love is. Plato tells us that it is the true appreciation of the forms, or something like that. Scripture enumerates all the pleasant natures and attributes of love that we hear read at every wedding and few funerals. But I don’t think enough has been written about what love does. What does love do to a person? How does love change a person, whether the source is interior or exterior? Do we let love change us? How should we?
In thinking of all the dead people who have ever loved me, all the aunts, uncles, neighbors, parishioners, friends, I understand that I underestimate their staying power. The realization about love is that love reverberates. I do not have a sufficient answer on what love does to us, but I have come to think of love as like the rocks my Papaw taught me to skip across the creek. Every time we show affection, care, and love, our action ripples out from ourselves. I am a ripple of all the people that have loved me, dead or living. My children will know the dead through my ripples.
This is how I understand the crucifixion. All love ripples from that moment in which God loved so vehemently and radically that He suffered and died. We are called to strive to echo, mirror, and ripple that life-giving act.
The widower of the deceased lady asked me to lector at her funeral. Below are some lines of the reading he chose. From the Book of Wisdom:
“But the souls of the just are in the hand of God…In the time of their visitation they shall shine, and shall dart about as sparks through stubble…the faithful shall abide with him in love: Because grace and mercy as with his holy ones, and his care is with the elect.”
Let us dance about as sparks through stubble and let the love of and from God skip, sending ripples through the waterways of our lives.
Grant is a McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville in the class of 2026. He is studying history and political science.