The Language of the Divine
Love is at the foundation of miracle because love, and the forgiveness it encompasses, is the language of the Divine.
The Miracle Collectors
My father was a typical Dad for a child growing up in the 1960s and '70s, absent during the week and leaving most of the parenting to my Mom. But on special occasions, birthdays especially, he always came through with a letter written in his beautiful penmanship on crisp, white personalized stationery for each of his five children. The letters were full of love and encouragement and observations about who we were that year or at that milestone. I can’t say I preserved much of anything from childhood, but these letters I held onto as if I was hanging on to myself.
My sister Mary reminded me of a story as we were writing The Miracle Collectors. It was her birthday, a December day some thirty years ago, as she sat in her living room watching her baby daughter Carolyn crawl around the floor. She was thinking about our Dad, who had died many years before, and how he would never know her daughter. The Christmas music didn’t help, and she began to cry. She had not been the best steward of his letters and thought, what I wouldn’t give to have one of his letters now. Just then, Carolyn began pulling books off of the lowest shelf of a bookcase. A bible that had been a wedding gift fell out and opened to the page where long ago a letter had been tucked inside, as if for safe keeping, but then forgotten. The letter was the one Dad had written for her seventeenth birthday, two years before his death. “You are a breath of fresh air in a much confused world,” it read in part. It is true that love, like the written word, lives on. For both to be delivered at a particular moment of longing is a testament to the existence of a spiritual connection in our physical world.
The last time I saw the letters I had kept so well, I was sitting on the back steps of my parents' home after the funeral, reading each one. And then, I lost them, picked up with the newspapers or some other accident of carelessness that caught up to me. Yet, love is never lost, and has an enduring power to reach across the years and never let go. (Katie)