Ashwin Pandiyan

This made me realise that my understanding of Love had become very very warped. It had resulted in a buying into a standard of love that I had given undue credence to throughout my life. I love my parents very dearly but it hit me that growing up, because they always knew I was capable of more, nothing ever seemed to satisfy them. And I had wholesale taken and superimposed the resulting understanding of love on God.  Contending with this realisation was difficult but in prayer, I realised that I was being led to view Jesus as my brother and friend. Not far away, sitting next to me on a bench, holding me close, loving me dearly and tenderly. This was an extremely comforting image and one that spoke to a very broken place in my heart. One that simply desired to be considered enough. This to me was like God saying “I love you, you are enough for me”.

I was both moved and thrilled with this encounter with God because it seemed to address the very core of what I was experiencing. It almost seemed like the key that would unravel this whole mess. And so, I gave thanks and waited expectantly for the peace that I was so yearning for. 10 days passed, the end of SOCL came and the Peace never came. It would have been very easy to fall into anger and despair. And I nearly did. 

But all the while something else was happening under the surface that I did not immediately realise. A big element of SOCL is the focus on mission. Dating back to my conversion experience, the importance of the fight for the salvation of souls was something that had been impressed on me, and over the years, it has been a big feature in the way I lived out my faith. But as SOCL drew to an end. I realized that this desire to minister to others had become more urgent, more pressing. What came to mind were all the friends I knew were, as Bishop Barron puts it, in the corra macra, the great emptiness. A quote that has always moved me from Mother Teresa is “The Hunger for Love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread”. Leaving SOCL, I was moved with this giddy desire to love the people in my life and to be with them in their great emptinesses. Somehow or another, even while I was struggling tremendously with what my relationship with God had become, the reality of the Love that had first saved my life 4 years ago had been brought to the forefront of my mind, even to the point where right there and then, the sorrow of the healing I had not experienced seemed a little less important. What instead stood firmly at the front of my mind was the vigor to Love. And that is the disposition I have been trying to lead my life with since. This invigoration actually set the stage for further revelations about my life and future. Even as a social work student, somewhere along the way I had become captivated, unhealthily so, by the prospects of what my career could be but this invigoration of my desire to love, led me to realise months later that I was not being called to aspire to sit in the top floor of MSF or NCSS, but instead to works of mercy. I can't express how much this revelation moved me because it involved me saying no to certain dreams, but falling in love with ones I never imagined I could have.