I wish I could write about love, but it escapes me completely. Nothing inspires young people to poetry quite like love – but Jane Austen once noted the “efficacy of poetry in driving away love,” and I’m not very good at it anyway, so I won’t venture into meter. But how else to begin? My life is crowded with love. Talking about it shouldn’t be hard, right?
Coffee with my mother in the mornings. Surprise notes from my father, written all in excited, reassuring capitals. My brother singing in his room. Pulling laundry off the line before a storm. Driving the car at night. The smell of the sea. Thick, thrumming, air so humid you could wring water out of it, if only there was a way to grasp the corners and begin to twist. Gardening in the rain, nostrils choked with the smell of earth and life, arms to the elbows in gritty, dark dirt. Fireflies. Freckles. Soccer. My parents dancing in the living room to Frank Sinatra. Wading through the backyard creek in rainboots with friends. Fig newtons. Peaches. Cats. The snaking, rippling feel of a horse moving out beneath you. The smell of good books. A friend’s embrace. Pajamas straight out of the dryer. Making a cake. Singing in the car with friends. Walking through tobacco rows barefoot. Autumn leaves. Spices. Clouds. Acorns.
I am a creature of earth, bound to the concrete, the particulars. Maybe they’re just too close. Maybe if I could step back from it all, I would be able to see clearly and talk about love. But I don’t think I could bear it. If a rainy day can make my bones ache with joy and longing all at once, I don’t think I would be ready to see Love without a veil, no longer clothed in the familiar particulars of life. Perhaps this is all training – we had to start small with love because we might shatter into a million pieces if we saw Love all at once.
Moses asked to see the glory of the Lord, but he couldn’t see God’s face, for “no one may see Me and live.” God had to put Moses in a cleft in the rock and cover him with His hand until He had passed by. And even after only seeing God’s back, Moses’s face was so radiant that the Israelites were afraid to approach until he put on a veil. That’s something, right there. Love too holy, too brilliant, too passionate to meet face to face without being consumed.
I see scudding leaves on a gritty sidewalk, hear wind chimes and the electric guitar thrumming faintly from someone’s basement, feel my hands grow cold until I can’t feel them at all, the bite of frost on my cheek and the crunch of gravel, the hush of the cold afternoon on Harrison, and a sudden tremor nearly rips my limbs apart. I can’t handle so much joy. Not yet.
And if my frame can hardly hold up walking home from school, how can I even begin to apply love to people? A handshake between friends. A husband and wife embracing in an airport. A baby in my arms, falling asleep. My father’s arm around me. A couple holding hands on the ferris wheel – her head fits into the crook of his neck just so. It moves me to speak, but I can’t quite capture the words. They’re probably too busy running over the hills where spices grow.
Lewis Thomas wrote: “Godel’s Theorem was once explained to me by a patient, gentle mathematician, and just as I was taking it all in, nodding appreciatively at the beauty of the whole idea, I suddenly felt something like the silent flicking of a mercury wall switch and it all turned to nonsense inside my head. I have had similar experiences listening to electronic music, and even worse ones with poetry criticism. It is not like blanking out or drifting off, not at all. My mind is, if anything, more alert, grasping avidly at every phrase, but then the switch is thrown and what comes in is transformed into an unfathomable code.” And here I am with the same dilemma.
“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” – G.K. Chesterton
We are like moths – or perhaps I shouldn’t generalize. Some might object to being categorized as drab flying insects. I am like a moth.. love draws me like a porch light. The beauty is so great that I’m caught and can’t help flying closer and closer, so close that I almost can see what the light is, I can almost describe the ecstasy of a warm summer evening, star-tipping on a winter night, rubbing shoulders with family and friends around the fireplace. But then my fragile dusty wings burst into flame and I fall, singed and gasping, away into the darkness. I’m not ready, not yet. But I was so close. Maybe next time.
Father Capon said that “love is as strong as death. Man was made to lead with his chin; he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.”
The flame is calling me again. Even now it’s hard to keep typing when my furry body is straining to gaze into the mystery once more. A cinder falls from my gently smoking wings. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. We were made to love. But these small loves direct our love elsewhere: in gratitude to Love himself.
“Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly beloved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” – Ephesians 5:1-2
And so I love, even if I can’t describe it, not without a thousand images, a thousand scents, a thousand songs. Again, more Capon (you can never have too much of him): “We were meant to lift the world with loving eyes and hands.” We love that the world might be made more lovely, that we might reflect the God who is Love, the marriage of the Lamb to his Bride, that we might one day fly straight into the flame and not be burned.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” – 1 Corinthians 13:12
Thanks be to God.
