We Are Made To Love

A number of years ago my daughter was diagnosed as anorexic. There was a lot to learn about what being anorexic actually meant but essentially it meant my daughter did not desire to eat or if she did, she would cause herself to throw up so that eventually should would die of starvation. 

In the hospital they would trick her into eating by threatening to force feed her and after she ate she would be restrained from going to the bathroom to throw up the food for at least an hour after which she was allowed to go to the bathroom and if she threw up it did not matter since the food had done its job.

At home it was an agonizing process of trying to convince the her to eat, through threatening of forced feeding at the hospital, and watching her that hour; cajoling her to eat but watching her for an hour.  If she were on her own she would be required to go to the doctor regularly to be weighed (a frightening thing for an anorexic) with the threat of hospitalization if her weight was dangerously low.

It’s strange to recall that I was eating some lunch at McDonald’s when I thought to myself that if my daughter could not be cured of her anorexia I just couldn’t live anymore so much was my love for her. I decided then that for me to survive the struggle of assisting her that I needed psychological help for myself and also, as a Christian, spiritual help for myself to get through this crisis which I realized could be a long and agonizing time. I secured the help of a good psychologist and a Christian  spiritual director.

Not only did I attend frequent appointments with these helpers but I arranged help for my daughter by arranging numerous appointments with psychologists for her through the years until finally after 6 agonizing years an appointment with two Christian psychologists, a man and his wife, were able to help her in a six week program so that she was able to eat on her own an adequate amount of food and not throw it up.

I learned several very important things as a result of six years of agony; it was only through these Christian psychologists that she was cured because only God could cure her ailment; the despair I had felt of not wanting to live if she were to die was not my love for her but a feeling that she was my possession and that if I lost my possession I would die. I came to an understanding that treating my daughter as a possession made me feel this terrible way.  I learned to think of her in a normal way of being my daughter whom I had to help through a genuine love of her not as my possession but as His! I realized that God, through his love for me, was asking me to love her not as my possession but as a person who needed God’s love through my love for her.

I had learned one of the most important things in my life: that God had given me many gifts, including my daughter, which were not to be seen as my possessions, which would be a denial of God’s loving gifts, leading me to a destruction of my happiness as intended by God.  Decades have passed since my daughter’s cure; she has gone through the effects of a horrible divorce from a narcissistic man who is trying to ruin her life through possession of their daughter who is now 11. But she is happily remarried to a Christian who is kind and supportive in her continuing ordeal of her ex-husband trying to destroy my daughter’s life through harm to their daughter. 

We communicate by phone frequently and I simply give her my love and advice to help her out of a moment of depression. But through it all she has not relapsed to her anorexia, so great is God’s love for her; she has become my friend, sometimes helping me with my troubles. She is happy with her new husband; she is the primary custodian of her daughter. We have no fear but that things will come out right in God’s way.

We are made to love; to love others, and through that love we pass to them God’s love; trusting in God to accomplish his will no matter what his will brings about, whether or not his will is in conformity with what our will might be; to realize that God’s will, through his love for my daughter has done the best thing for her through my love for her. This is God’s mission in life for each of us to love others and wish the best for them but trust in God that he will do the best for them.

Edith Stein, a Jewish woman, a brilliant philosopher and writer who had stopped believing in God at 14, had a Christian friend whose husband had been killed in the First World War; she went to visit her friend to commiserate with her for her terrible loss. But her friend, through her Christian faith, did not despair and had trust in the Lord that his death amounted to God’s desire to bring him home to Himself; Edith was amazed; as a result of reading her friend’s copy of the autobiography of St Theresa of Avila, Edith declared “This is Truth” and was baptized a Christian, ultimately giving her life as a martyr for Christ, for the Jewish people, in Auschwitz in 1942; she is now known as St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross.