“Quitting is not love. Godde doesn’t quit.”

I heard the words and they echoed in my ears throughout the day. I am still processing them.

I can think of many reasons, many situations, many ways to quit. I avoid tense, angry situations, for instance. I walk away from painful relationships. I rarely make a scene; I just disappear, I make myself invisible.

As I reflected upon my quitting pattern, my first reaction, once again, was to blame my mother. At my age, this has become ridiculous. Somewhere along my life, many times probably, I was given the chance to improve on what I had received, to become “me” rather than the by-product of someone else.

To quit on us, to leave husband and children for several months to go and have fun with a lover, my mother had to suspend temporarily whatever love she felt for us. Months later, after her lover had returned to his wife, she came back to us more out of duty than for love’s sake.

At birth, I received the gift of faithfulness; later, the fear of being abandoned set in. I grew up on sarcasm;  a sarcastic tone has me run away, or rather slip back into my shell, like a turtle or a snail. Sometimes, I become angry, which does not help.

A friend of mine who runs family constellation workshops, remarked that people who have a wounded inner child may never be truly able to grow passed the age at which the wound was given. However old I get, my emotions may remain stuck at nine years old.

Blaming my mother belongs to another era somehow. For a new me was born, a bit like the Eunuch in today’s gospel, when my own ‘Philip’ (her name was Sujatha) passed her spirit of fire on to me, years ago now. This new me is also taking a long time to grow up.

“Quitting is not love. Godde doesn’t quit.”

Sometimes one needs to quit a relationship because all that remains of the original love is toxic and dangerous to one’s soul, one’s spirit, one’s life. I cannot therefore judge anyone who quits.

I believe that“Godde doesn’t quit“, however desperate the situation might be. Godde is with the schoolgirls who have been kidnapped in Nigeria, as well as with their parents and their kidnappers. Godde was in the concentration camps, among the decimated American Indian tribes and with the Armenians during their genocide. Godde can bear all pains.

“Godde doesn’t quit”. However sinful, stupid, thoughtless, superficial I may be, Godde will stand by me. This is what I truly heard the other day. Because I believe this, I want to follow in Godde’s footsteps. Therefore, I cannot quit those I love, however scared, mixed up, conflicted, angry I may feel. I want to learn to love like Godde loves.

Hearing “Quitting is not love. Godde doesn’t quit”, may have been just the words I needed for me to grow up. At last.

Miracle of miracles.

 

Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Washington D.C., 1947