Among the excellent stories of O. Henry, one of the best is “The Gift of the Magi”. It’s a tale about a young couple (James Dillingham Young and his wife Della) who barely have enough to survive on what James earns. They live in a small apartment in the city, and their budget hardly stretches far enough, but they are happy.
When winter approaches, each of them looks for a way to get some money, because in their heart they have decided to give the other the best Christmas gift. James’s most valuable possession was the gold pocket watch he had inherited from his father. Della thinks the best gift she can give him is a chain for his watch. Seeing that the price of the chain was far beyond her means, Della chose to sell her long and beautiful dark hair.
James had plans of his own. After going all over the city, he finally found the perfect gift for his beloved wife: a set of tortoiseshell combs for her beautiful hair. Seeing that the money he had wasn’t enough, he chose to sell -you can already guess- his pocket watch to buy the combs.
Love is like that. Ridiculous. Illogical. Foolish. But what is life if love is missing? What kind of meaning could be given to a life without love? Love is a reality that is hard to put into concepts, a mystery that admits of no easy explanations. We have been created in the image and likeness of God, and God is love. Without love we become monsters of nature; we become an enigma to ourselves. Jesus Christ had already warned that there is more happiness in giving than in receiving, and so it is. Happiness is found in self-forgetfulness and in giving oneself to others.
This leads us to an important conclusion, one that makes the contemporary mindset shudder: happiness and suffering are not two opposite poles! Advertisers have worked hard to make us believe that the solution to unhappiness is the elimination of pain: “take a pill”, “take a vacation”, “have a drink”. Tangled up in this mindset, we will hardly be able to understand the logic of love. Love does not run away from suffering. The mystery of love is a mystery of sacrifice, of self-denial, of self-forgetfulness for the sake of the other. That is why the culture of “cotton wool” and of “feeling good” is incapable of offering happiness, because it makes us incapable of loving. And it makes us incapable of loving because it makes us incapable of forgetting ourselves.
Author: Thomas Williams