Who teaches us how to really love?

Written by Tom Cooper

General Charles de Gaulle is well known as the leader of the Free French Forces in World War II and President of France; What is not as well known, is that his daughter Anne had Down syndrome.

Anne was Charles's youngest daughter. It would have been expected in their day that the parents would have institutionalized their child, but they did not. Charles and his wife Yvonne raised Anne at home with their other two children and she was made to feel no different than anyone else. She could not see well and only spoke inarticulate sounds, and she did not walk until the age of 10.

Though he was known as private, cocky, and stoic by nature, Charles was different around Anne. He took walks with her, read her stories, and sang to her. He called Anne, “my joy”, showering her with affection. Anne in many ways was Charles’s favorite child. Sadly, she succumbed to pneumonia when she was 20 years old, dying in her father's arms. He carried a portrait of Anne with him at all times, and when Charles himself died, he was buried beside his beloved daughter.

After World War II, in 1948, Charles and Yvonne founded the Fondation Anne de Gaulle, a home for disabled girls (many of whom had intellectual disabilities), which continues still today.

One of Charles de Gaulle’s biographers* records him as once saying, "Without Anne, I could never perhaps have done what I did. She gave me the heart and inspiration." He also wrote, “Her birth was a trial for my wife and myself. But believe me, Anne is my joy and my strength. She is the grace of God in my life... She has kept me in the security of obedience to the sovereign will of God.” **

In that sense, de Gaulle (who was a devout Catholic) and his beloved Anne teach us something that we are tempted to forget—that all of us can find strength in weakness and that nothing is more powerful than self-giving love.

As a follower of Jesus, Charles would have heard these words from the New Testament: “Love is patient; love is kind;... it is not irritable or resentful…. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” 1 Corinthians 13

In our own lives, who in their weakness offers us the opportunity to learn how to love? It could be a spouse, a family member, a friend, a neighbour, someone mentally, emotionally, physically challenged, or someone you have met along the way.

Whoever it is, they are our guide to learn how to love: deeply, costly, and enduringly. And as with de Gaulle, our faith can help when our ability to love is found limited. And we are the ones who end up grateful and changed.

God knows what we could be like and what we could do when sacrificial loving offers both “heart and inspiration” into our daily lives.

Blessings,
Tom

*The late Jean Lacouture

** A Certain Idea of France: The life of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson