The Amazing Power of Love
There once were two mothers. Each had been treated poorly by Germans in World War II, and each had the chance to show her son her reaction and teach him how she wanted him to react also.
The first mother was American and her son was called Chauncey. He was with her the day she was notified that her soldier husband had been killed by the Germans. “Son, make this right!” Chauncey’s mother urged. So Chauncey, bearing his father’s knife in his hand, agreed with all his heart that he would get revenge!
The second mother was Polish and had a son named Marek. Marek had seen a Nazi soldier push his mother to the ground and tear off her Star of David necklace. He was angry with the Nazis for their rough treatment of her and he wanted to go administer some revenge! “No, my son,” she urged, “whatever happens, you must love. Promise me you will love.” “OK,” he relented, and hugged her tight.
Later, both young men found themselves in the heart of Nazi Germany at a Concentration camp, at the end of the war. Chauncey had grown up to be a soldier. He was there with the US armed forces to liberate the camp and relocate the people. He was filled with horror to see the atrocities and death in the camp, so his anger against “those filthy Germans” flared even stronger. Chauncey got a group together to go to a nearby farmhouse to take out their anger on these “Krauts,” to seek revenge by plundering and molesting them! For this crime, he was later put in prison and lost his fiancée in the process. Hatred had ruined his life.
The other young boy Marek had grown to be an amazing linguist and a father of his own young Jewish family. One fateful day, the Nazis stormed his home, dragged his wife and five children out, and shot them before Marek’s eyes. Begging to die too, he was nonetheless kept alive in a concentration camp for his ability with languages. At that point, Marek had to make a decision: to hate or to love. Keeping his promise to his mother, he chose to love everyone he met. ‘I had to decide right then,’ he later told the liberating soldiers, ‘whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this . . . Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life—whether it was a few days or many years—loving every person I came across.’
In the concentration camp where Marek was sent, love was the only difference between him and all the other inmates who were skin and bones, sick and apathetic, hardly alive. “For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, but without the least physical or mental deterioration.” “Wild Bill,” as the Americans called him, had kept his health, his intellectual abilities, and his empathy for others—all because he decided to love. And in the end, his wife was found in a different camp. She was recovering from her gunshot wounds and elated to find her beloved again! (This story is from the play The Hate Hypothesis by Kyle Ellingson that is based on the true story of Wild Bill found in Return from Tomorrow, by George Ritchie page 114-116, quoted above.)
What a difference the two mothers in this story made! What a difference every mother makes, on generations to come. The little thoughts and attitudes that she daily feeds her child become a part of that child and determine much of the shape of a lifetime ahead.
“Mothers have the power to shape the architecture of the brain, and the expression of genetic traits. This is a Godly power no one else has.” (Dr. Marlene Hinton is speaking here of her research on attachment and the amazing power of mothers. To read her amazing findings, see http://ideasformypocket.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-godly-power-of-attachment.html )
To sum it up, she urges us: “Spending time with our children is the most important thing mothers can do in time or eternity.”
May we celebrate mothers and mothering! May we each thank our mothers for the good they instilled in us, and carry it forward. We can be an integral part of the amazing power of love.