Failing into Love: A Better Life

Suffering seems to have the effect of burning away all that is unimportant, bringing to the fore the essentials in life. At least that's the reaction I had to the fine film A Better Life. It's a love story about an undocumented Mexican in LA trying to support his 16 year old son, who, with his mother gone, wonders why he was born into this rat race of a world.

Seeing his father's suffering brings home the essential point: that he lives because of his father's love. And he understands this only after he sees his father's suffering -- his loss of a truck that would bring him to a better life, his failed efforts to recover it, his ultimate failure and deportation. Only when he sees his father through compassionate eyes, turning away from his own wants and expectations, does he come to appreciate his dad's love for him, his love for his dad. The physical distance caused by deportation symbolizes their spiritual closeness. The boy now knows why he is born, knows "a better life."

I experience this against my own background of lack of love. Julian Carron, in the article I mentioned yesterday, "Christ Is Something That is Happening To Me Now," observes:

There is a kind of drifting away from Christ, except in particular moments. What I mean is that there is a drifting away from Christ except when we set ourselves to pray.

I sense my own distance from God being narrowed through compassion, through entering into the suffering of others, and into my own suffering. As James Danaher observes in Contemplative Prayer, ch. 8, "What we need is a theology that maximizes our experience of forgiveness, and for that purpose, contemplative prayer is ideally suited."

In prayer we can experience God's great compassion for the sufferings we see about us, and experience ourselves. This "failing into love" is the better way of life, I believe.