And It Will Not Be Taken

By Cate MacDonald Gilbert
Head of Academics for K-12 and Assistant Professor of Great Texts
The Saint Constantine School

As a young wife and mother, I have found that my life continually demonstrates the Lord’s bounty and love for me while simultaneously demonstrating that I don’t particularly deserve it.

As an example, I often take his many blessings as opportunities to worry. I worry about my children, my husband, our home, our schedules, our two very consuming jobs, and even our dog. More significantly, I have found myself indulging one of my bigger fears: the fear of losing the ones I love so much. 

This same fear has plagued me most of my life. I am from a loving and whole family, one that I treasure, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t fear losing someone in my family, or being lost by them. The grief that comes from the death of a loved one is one of the most painful things we can experience. I felt a portion of it a few years ago when my grandfather died. Such loss of another person is irreparable. Losing someone you love, devastating. They are gone and they shouldn’t be, and there is nothing you can do about it. 

There are few things in life that cannot be taken away, and it seems that the best times only highlight this fact. In choosing to love deeply, I am choosing to potentially experience great loss. In choosing to love the world around you, you must also grieve more at the brokenness and pain it contains. 

QUOTE

“There are few things in life that cannot be taken away, and it seems that the very best times only highlight this fact. In choosing to love deeply, I am choosing to potentially experience great loss.”

There is, of course, a sole exception: your relationship with God. God cannot be taken from you by any of the forces that can take everything else, and this means that devoting yourself to prayer is devoting yourself to the development of an eternal and unbreakable relationship. 

You’ve probably heard something like this before, as I know I had, but it never truly sunk in until I experienced real grief and fear. It had been told to me like a platitude, a kind of “Isn’t it cool to talk to God because you’ll be talking to God forever!” (which actually seemed to me like a reason not to bother talking to him, since I’d have plenty of time).

Martha was alone, working hard in the kitchen to serve Jesus and his disciples, while her sister Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him. But when Martha asked Jesus to send her sister to help her in the work, Jesus said to her, “…only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.” When I reflect on this story, I cannot help but think that Jesus means more than that he won’t make Mary work in the kitchen. He has eternal things in view.

In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius argues that we cannot rely on anything impermanent or unprotected for our happiness, since we would, in fact, always be relying on the thing that keeps it in our lives or protects it. So if you rely on money to give you happiness, you are actually depending on the person who guards your money, and your happiness is dependent on circumstance and fortune. Instead, Boethius searches for a source of happiness that cannot be taken away. And the thing he finds is holiness. 

QUOTE

“Sitting at the feet of Christ can never be taken from you; not by circumstance or time, trial or persecution. Your life in prayer is yours forever, and yours completely.”

Sitting at the feet of Christ can never be taken from you; not by circumstance or time, trial or persecution. Your life in prayer is yours forever, and yours completely. It is that in which you can rest and feel at peace. This is an amazing comfort to me, for from it springs a great deal of hope and security. If God cannot be taken from you, then all other griefs and fears can be held in that relationship, submitted to it. In the face of loss, you still can know of one great, shining thing that is yours.

And it will not be taken.