A Mother's Love

THAT LUCKY SOUL whose life was spent in vocation, blissful duty to God, self and mankind is accepting of his fate. Better is life spent performing one's own vocation, no matter how lowly, than in that of another, as that brings great danger to life everlasting. Motherhood, the highest of vocations yet most common, lights the soul of mother. Individual love finds unity in the ocean of God's love. The love of mother for child is the purest of loves. It is love given freely from generation to generation with no expectations, no strings attached. It is mother giving heart, soul, and self, her essential being, pure, focused, concentrated love. This love flowing into baby's heart, nourishes this new life's soul. This love, though only a drop of concentrated individual love, gives us a glimpse of the ocean of God's love, omnipresent, eternal. Unifying bliss, I am That, Thou art That, all of manifest creation is That. All that is lacking are the eyes of the enlightened saved souls to see it. This is pure bliss consciousness, the one true vocation of every man, woman and child blessed with God's highest gift, life as a human being. No drop of precious love is lost as it merges with the ocean of God's love. Love, the treasure of the universe, flows between mother and child, an invincible force of nature, in the highest of holy vocations, motherhood.

A simple mother, Denise of Dallas, Texas, her body filled with cancer, is told by the finest doctors that she is going to die. Time, precious time, has run out. Planning her burial, she pursues one precious thought, her love for her three young daughters. Denise commissions a stained glass window.

She plans with Bovard Studio artists a window with her three young daughters playing in the garden. They are swinging among the clouds with their guardian angel's ever protecting conduit of an absent mother's love. The angel hovers over their blissful play, protecting innocent pure hearts, their treasured mother's love an eternal, precious drop in the ocean of God's love.

Defying her doctors', modern day sages, certain predictions, Denise clings to life, waiting the months it takes to see the stained glass window she has commissioned as she painstakingly helps the artists design every detail. In Fairfield, Iowa, Bovard Studio's artists create line by line, glass cut by glass cut, brush stroke by brush stroke, fired indelibly into the stained glass by the tongues of fire in Bovard Studio's gas fired kilns. A glimpse of precious mother's love is captured for time immemorial.

After the final pieces of stained glass are assembled, cradled in their lead cames, Bovard Studio's craftsmen place the final touches on the stained glass in the Dallas mausoleum, Denise's final resting place. Denise arrives with her loving husband and three precious loves. Tears flow freely as she sees her vision is realized. She returns home, to her vocation, a mother's life lived, her soul with all its precious love joins the ocean of God's love.

As we turn around to leave Denise's final resting place, directly across from her memorial stained glass window lies the new grave of Mickey Mantle. Autographed baseballs are piled there by teammates and rivals who stop by to pay their final respects.