The Love Remains

Mother’s Day Reflection

On the love that still watches over us, even after the visible world has changed.

I truly believe in serendipity.

I believe certain messages arrive exactly when the heart is finally quiet enough to hear them.

This morning, I found myself thinking about Ma, and about Joan Wallem, Steve’s beautiful mother. There are mornings when certain people simply arrive beside you again in thought, almost as though they have pulled up a chair without announcing themselves. You feel their presence in the room before you even understand why.

So I turned on the Mass.

I often do that when the world feels heavy or confusing, or when my spirit feels as though it has been carrying too much noise for too long. And somehow, every single time, I leave with my heart steadier than when I arrived. It is almost like a human tune up. A realignment. A reminder that the soul needs tending just as much as the body does.

And today, something settled over me with unusual clarity.

It felt serendipitous, almost as though the message had arrived through Ma and Joan themselves, two women who understood gentleness not as weakness, but as strength properly softened by love.

This is what I carried away:

When life changes beyond our control, we are invited to trust that we are still held. We are asked to answer pain with gentleness, to carry hope without arrogance, and to recognize that love is not only something we receive from the outside. It can also become something living within us.

Love does not disappear simply because a person, a place, a season, or a former version of our life is gone. Something remains. Something continues speaking quietly beneath all the visible change. Something still guides us. Something still steadies us.

The visible world changes constantly. Homes change. Relationships change. Communities shift. People leave. Time keeps moving whether we are ready for it or not. Yet beneath all of it, the inner presence of love, truth, conscience, and hope continues.

Not loudly.

Not theatrically.

But faithfully.

Sometimes it survives only as a small flicker in the dark. The instinct to remain kind. The willingness to begin again. The ability to still recognize beauty in an ordinary afternoon, or comfort in the sound of a familiar hymn.

And perhaps that is what grace is…

Not the absence of grief, but the realization that grief is not the only thing that remains.

The love remains.

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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.