SEAMLESS LOVE

                We’ve heard of timeless love, endless love, May-December love, puppy love…all kinds of love. Timeless love –love that makes time stand still. Endless love- love without end. Puppy love- love that is immature. This summer I learned of a different kind of love: seamless love. Seamless love-love without seams, is coherent, without lines or wrinkles, blemish or interruption.  Seamless love is beautiful and wondrous to behold.

My father is 82 and in July suffered a cerebral hemorrhagic stroke. It left him pretty well motionless on his right side and unable to communicate well. That is an understatement. Since the stroke, he has had two bad infections, one of which nearly killed him. It has been a journey for all of us, most particularly, my father and mother. The stroke happened about three weeks after they celebrated their 60^th anniversary. They were married in Jakarta, Indonesia, moved to the Netherlands and then to America. My parents had five children, suffered much discrimination as immigrants to America and managed to become quite successful. They have gone through much together across three continents. But that is not what seamless love is.

I saw seamless love one day as my mother and I waited forty five minutes for an aide to come. My father, at that time, was still fairly well incapacitated, unable to walk or stand. He had had a bowel movement. My mother pressed the button for the nurse to come. I went out to the nurse’s station and explained that my father needed help. No one came. So we waited. No one came. We waited some more. And still, no one came.  My father was uncomfortable in a different way then I was uncomfortable. It is an odd feeling to know your father cannot control his bladder or bowels. My mother is not one to bother with feelings of discomfort. So she did what she always does. She did it herself…the cleaning, I mean.

She didn’t want help. She walked over to the bed, then, very gently and tenderly started talking to my father, explaining that she was going to clean him and clucking her tongue, chiding the aides for not coming.  My mother laughed a little, making secret little jokes, All the while, she was rolling him on his side so she could remove the filthy diaper. Gently, so gently she pulled down his sweatpants, took off his diaper. Never, not once, did I detect one hint of resentment or disgust.

While I was watching this act of selflessness occur in slow motion, I found myself in disbelief and a thousand thoughts raced through my head: oh my goodness, it smells. This is her husband. This is her lover. This is her life companion. She’s cleaning his bottom. She’s using wipes. This is weird. My father wears a diaper now. This is beautiful. This is humbling. This is humiliating. That’s my father. And, all the while, my mother was whispering, laughing with him, talking gently to him to make sure that he was not uncomfortable. Then in about ten minutes, she was finished.

Without skipping a beat, without interruption, without a wrinkle, my mother moved from cleaning and serving my father, to romancing him. She leaned over, nuzzled him and whispered: “Hey I miss sleeping with you at night. You need to get better and come home. I miss you.”  To her, I was not even in the room. I just started to cry because I was witnessing beauty and intimacy-seamless love. To witness such a moment of seamless love is an honor and humbling.

What is seamless love? It is the seamless movement from the dirt and filth of reality and life into the wonder, delight and intimacy of true and genuine love. It is a woman who is able to clean her lover’s bottom of his waste and love him and whisper her aching and longing for him. It is the seamless movement of a father lifting up his robes, running down the road to embrace his pig slopped son. It is a God who takes us out of the pit of our disgusting filthy sin, picks us up into His divine arms and holds us close in redemptive love and grace. That is seamless love. And when we recognize seamless love, it overpowers us with its beauty and grace. May God reveal to us more and more the beauty of His seamless love in us and through us.