As the final seconds of last Monday's game wound down, the tears on the faces of Gonzaga fans and players alike reminded me, as they always do, of the first time I cried over a sports event. My beloved Baltimore Colts succumbed to Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns by a score of 27-0 in the 1964 NFL Championship game.  I had always lived in Oregon, and I have no idea why I became such a fan of the Colts, but I did. I suspect it was mostly about Johnny Unitas, but Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore had something to do with it as well. I was devastated by their defeat; there was something hard, unjust, unfair about a world in which this could happen.

     My dad, I must say, handled it poorly. He got irritated that I would invest that much emotion in a bunch of professional athletes, particularly ones I had never seen except on TV. He was of course right; it was silly, ridiculous even to cry over the Colts, and I came to understand that as I grew older. But my grief in the moment was no less real for all that, and that was the point my dad missed.

     Grief when it comes is profound no matter how superficial the cause, and it is never resolved by demeaning the source of it. I hope the dads of the ten-year-old children who cried over the Zags understand that.  I hope those parents told their tearful children that no matter how sad they were in that moment they were still beloved, the Bulldogs would be back next year, and they would be there to root for them just as fervently as ever before. Defeat and failure, though constants of life, are never ultimate. There is always another opportunity for those who care enough, who love enough, to take it.

     What has this to do with Holy Week and Easter? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing; I just felt the need to say this.   We all live with loss, we all live with failure of one sort or another--whether the source of loss and failure is profound in any absolute sense or not--and so we all live nearly all the time with some level of grief.  What I have learned over the course of my life is that there is really only one durable treatment for grief, and that is love.

     When we grieve and don't get love, the grief sets in and hardens until it constricts us in ways we don't understand and often don't even notice. When we grieve and get love, the grief remains pliable, we remain able to move within it, and it doesn't constrict us. Maybe that is what this has to do with this week. This is a grief--filled week, but a week suffused as well with love, and it is the love that has the last word, the love that sees us through.