God's love is a mother's embrace - death 4th week lent wednesday

I would like to use our daily reading for this mass instead of the readings for the mass for the dead.  I always believe that God has an appropriate message for us in these readings in whatever occasion and need we find ourselves in.

Today our first reading from the book of Isaiah speaks of God’s love as a mother’s love.  It is a mother’s love because it is a love that can never forget her children.  The term used by the prophet Isaiah for mother’s love comes from the Hebrew word rehem which literally means a mother’s embrace. Watching National Geographic I get to wonder how a baby seal and his mother could find each other among the thousands of babies on the shore, or how can a mother deer find her own from calf from among the many.  They say it’s the unique smell, it’s the unique cry embedded in the memory of the animal from the time it was born.  Jews believe that in the human person it is the mother’s first embrace that cannot be forgotten.  It is a love that can never forget.  Isaiah used this as a metaphor to describe God’s love for us. 

And yet even if what is thought an impossibility ever happens, even if a mother forgets her child, Isaiah said, God will never forget you.

We all desire a love that will never forget.  We feel hurt when we are forgotten, especially when we are forgotten by the people we thought love us.  We feel insecure when little by little we are no longer accorded the limelight we had before.  We feel spent and used when we become sick, when we are no longer in control as we had before, and because of this we sometimes feel deserted thinking that we have been abandoned and people no longer care as before.  People have forgotten us.  In fact one of the fears of dying is the fear of being one day forgotten. 

Perhaps this is part of our growing up, or more specifically, this is part of our growing old, this is part of getting sick, this is part of losing control.  Perhaps this is part of dying.  We need to go through this, we need to confront our fear of being forgotten.   We need to be secure only in God and not in human adulation and attention; to be secure only in the thought that even if all those we love forget us, God will never forget us; to be secure in the thought that God alone remembers and that is more than enough.

Today we gather to pray for our beloved dead, Francisco.  The church always reminds us not to forget, to always remember our dead, to pray for them.

It is a consolation to be remembered.  People would even go to extreme of building monuments just to be remembered, in their fear of being forgotten.  But mark this, even if we are forgotten by everyone, God will never forget us.