While at a COR (Christ in Others) retreat with my late wife, I briefly met a paraplegic on a field trip to Participation House, an assisted-living residence in Markham. On the visit, I learned his name was Alf Saltarelli. I decided at the end of the retreat to initiate regular visits with him.
On my first visit, he was in a wheelchair, which he moved by slapping at a joystick, having little control over his limbs and none over his fingers. He drooled as he tried to articulate words. Although he was friendly, his limited control over his tongue mean I couldn’t understand a word he said. I felt incapable of dealing with the situation and looked for the earliest opportunity to extract myself from his room. Safely out, I was ashamed of
myself and committed myself to a return visit.
I discovered that he was not only friendly but positive. He exhibited absolutely no self-pity. I disciplined myself to do my utmost to understand a bit of what he tried to say to me. He would patiently repeat a single sentence over and over again until I finally understood. In each subsequent visit, I could understand a bit more and became more comfortable with him. He took me on a tour of his residence, unselfconsciously slamming his wheelchair into whatever he could not avoid.
He showed me his IBM Selectric typewriter on which he told me he was writing a book. “As if!”, I thought. He demonstrated. Beside the typewriter was a mouthpiece at the end of a stick standing in an empty water glass. The keyboard of the typewriter was covered with clear plastic wrap. He extracted the mouthpiece and, bending over the keyboard, drooled on it as he pressed the keys with the stick. Each time he typed an incorrect character, he
backspaced, activating IBM’s ingenious built-in correcting ribbon, and then retyped the correct character. Backspacing repeatedly, he managed a short sentence in a few minutes of effort. A few years later, he gave me a copy of his autobiography he had had published.
Over a few months, my feelings went from discomfort with him to admiration of him to a love of him. My trepidation in anticipation of each visit faded away once I was with him. The visits themselves were less and less difficult and more and more rewarding. I realized I had developed an agape love of him.
As you may know, agape love is selfless and unconditional. It does not depend on attraction. It does not depend on that love being requited. It is the highest form of love. Could our creator’s love for us be agape? How can it be otherwise when it loves us no matter what we do and despite our failure to consistently return that love?
The inductive and deductive reasoning in Chapter 13 of Discovering Life’s Purpose and in the Meaning of Life Videos Series is unrefuted. It provides knowledge, as strong as any knowledge we possess, that our creator loves us and wants us to love it, and all its created as it loves us, in eternal intimacy with it. Must that not mean that we need to develop the capacity of agape love in order to be with our creator eternally where its will is done?
I fell into my first experience of agape love. Must I not actively pursue every opportunity to develop agape love for at least some of the homeless, the homebound, the despairing, the grieving, the institutionalized, the lonely, the hospitalized, the incarcerated, the parolees? Must not we all?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the Amazon Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.