At Christmas I visited a cousin who suffers from memory loss. He was pleased to see me and I was reasonably confident that he remembered me. We chatted companionably and then he asked me: “How’s Aunty May?”

 Now I saw that he did indeed know who I was. Aunty May was my mother. I explained that she died some years ago (over 20, in fact) and he nodded sadly. My parents were good to him as a child and I am reminded of the reality that we are family. If he loves me it is because I am my parents’ child; the good they did, the love they gave, have come down to me.

We are often reminded of the importance of being loved for ourselves, for who we are. Such unconditional love is vastly important. To know that we are loved but not for anything we do or achieve, not for our looks, or our cleverness, is an important psychological building block, a social standing place and spiritual comfort.

To be loved not for who we are but because we inherit love is something else. It does not happen in all families but when it does it is extraordinarily freeing. Love is there before we are; we come into it. We come into it as we might come into an inheritance. We come into it as we might drive into the sun after rain. If there is something in us that evokes love, it is drawn out of us in the love, divine and human, that awaited our birth.

In my Christmas visit I was led to remember the love that passes to us and through us, that is greater than us, the sacredness of the human, the embodiment of the divine.