Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.  While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. (John 17:11b-12a)

Wrapped in the name

“This sucks,” Rachel announced, as we walked in the early dark across the parking lot, after Ben’s graduation. She paused, then sighed, “but it is as it should be,” resigned to the river of time that would soon carry her eldest to university classrooms, beyond reach of her morning hugs and the fierce love that possessed her since she first cradled this black-haired boy in a Chicago hospital, husband Armando at her side.

Fierce is the only way she knows how to love, as those blessed to be recipients of her passions well know. But loving is not only the joy of graduation nights. It also means losing and hurting and fearing and letting go when you want to hold fast, wrapping your beloved in protective arms when you know what the world can do to them.

It’s life, as it should be. If I needed a reminder, I saw it the next day as I drove down Belmont Avenue and saw the sign in front of Puffer Elementary announcing the date for kindergarten registration. Exciting, yes, but in mere weeks other parents will stand at bus stops or the school house door holding a small hand they are not quite ready to release.

“For God’s sake, protect them,” the heart cries, and it is a holy cry, a prayer wrung also from the heart of Jesus as he takes leave of those he loved in the world and loved to the end. I wrapped them in your name, the name you gave me, he prays to the Loving Mystery he calls Holy Father.

The name is not a mere word or label spoken on the breath. It means the heart, the substance, the deepest, truest, reality of all God is. The name is the fierce love and hope the Holy One holds for each of us and the crazy world in which we live and die. The name is the divine determination to hold us fast in love’s embrace as we wander far from the places that gave us birth.

The name is the Living Presence who is ever near when we lose our way. It is the Mystery of renewing breath when the world does its worst to extinguish our joy. The name is the Love who filled our hearts in the early dark of a parking lot, transforming us into sacraments of divine grace.

We go our ways, as do our beloved, never knowing exactly where we will go or how far. Joys will come, sorrows, too; hurts will wound, and hopes will rise, perhaps none greater than those we imagine as our beloved set out on their course.

We can’t go with them, so we pray with Jesus. Protect them, dear God. Protect us all. For heaven’s sake … and for our own, wrap us in your name.

David L. Miller