Three Philosophies Of Life Part 4

Therefore, in the beginning was the Song of Songs. This book goes even farther back than Genesis, into the eternal heart of the Trinity.

2.Love Is the Greatest Song.

Also in the t.i.tle is the notion that love Is not only a song but also the "song of songs", the greatest of songs. The Hebrew language has no superlative degree of comparison and uses instead this form: "greatest king" is "king of kings" and "greatest song" is "song of songs".

("Song of Solomon" is not the original t.i.tle but the invention of modern editors. The original t.i.tle, in the Hebrew Scriptures, is always the first verse, for these writings were scrolls, not books, and had no separate covers or t.i.tle pages.) What does it mean to call love the "greatest of songs"? Two things, at least. First, most obviously, it means love is the greatest in value value. The poem itself says this, near the end: "If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned" (Song 8:7). Nothing can buy love because nothing is as precious as love; nothing can be exchanged for it. (This is also one reason why love must be free, as we will see later.) Song of Songs here antic.i.p.ates 1 Corinthians 13: "The greatest of these is love."

But I think there is a second meaning implied, too: love is the greatest in size. The song of G.o.d that his creative love sings, that is, our lives, includes all other songs. Love is the meaning of the whole. We are all notes in G.o.d's symphony. When we listen only to pur own note or to the few notes around us, it does not look like music or like love, but when we step back and look at the whole, everything falls into place as great music. Of course we are in no position to do this "stepping back" on our own power. How could we possibly get the G.o.d's-eye point of view? Only if G.o.d revealed it to us-as he has done here. Faith means believing this divine revelation. The man's-eye sharing in the G.o.d's-eye point of view is, precisely, the eye of faith.

The practical difference this image makes is immense. If you think you are making only meaningless noise, you are in Ecclesiastes'"vanity". If you think you are making music, you are in love. That is why Job is so dramatic: Job's question is ultimately: Am I only making noise, or am I making music? Am I in vanity, or am I in love?

A mythic image uses a part to symbolize the whole-for example, the earth is a great egg; the nine worlds grow from Yggdrasil, the cosmic ash tree; the world rests on the back of a giant turtle; life is a bowl of cherries-all these images seek to comprehend something of the whole by the symbolic use of the part. For we have no concept of the whole, of the meaning of everything, since concepts must always be defined and finite and set off from something else. The finite human mind can comprehend only finite concepts. But there is a way in which a finite, partial concept can mean or suggest the whole: by symbolism. The whole is something like an egg, or a tree, or a turtle, or a bowl of cherries. Thus Jesus constantly uses dramatic mythic images called parables to suggest the mysterious and indefinable but very real and definite "Kingdom of G.o.d": it is like a mustard seed, like a fishnet, like a fine pearl, like a vineyard. A picture is worth a thousand words, especially if it is a moving picture, a story. Somehow, these pictorial symbols can suggest more than they can say.

Now the fundamental question for Wisdom, for all three of the Wisdom books we are exploring, is: What is human life, human existence? Ecclesiastes' answer was the dreaded word vanity vanity, or nothingness, emptiness. Job knows life's meaning as suffering-but to what end, he does not find until the end. The answer of Song of Songs is that all of life is a love song. Every subatomic particle, from the Big Bang to the senility of the sun, is a note in this incredibly complex symphony. Every event, everything that has ever happened, the fall of every hair and every sparrow, is a theme in the surpa.s.singly perfect melody of this song. But we who are in it do not hear or know it unless we are told by the Singer, who is outside it and who alone can know the point of the whole. Just as Pythagoras said we did not hear the "music of the spheres" for the same reason the blacksmith did not hear the hammering on the anvil: because he is too close to it, too used to it-so we do not hear the whole until we are outside the whole, after death; until we are are whole, after death. In Heaven we will hear ourselves singing, that is, we will hear what we have sung. whole, after death. In Heaven we will hear ourselves singing, that is, we will hear what we have sung.

3.Love Is Dialogue.

The poem is in dialogue form, bride and groom singing to each other antiphonally, because love is essentially dialogue, and the form of a perfect poem manifests the content; the medium manifests the message.

There are only three ultimate messages, three possible philosophies of life. According to atheism, there is only the human monologue with no G.o.d to dialogue with. According to pantheism, there is only divine monologue with no created world of free souls for G.o.d to dialogue with. All is One. Only according to theism is there dialogue between Creator and creature. Only in theism does mankind confront an Other.

Thus the dialogue between lovers manifests a whole philosophy of life. It is no accident that love poetry blossoms more in theistic cultures than in atheistic or pantheistic ones.

The dialogue between male and female creatures reflects the dialogue within within the Creator, the dialogue between Father and Son that eternally becomes the Holy Spirit. Life is dialogue ultimately because life is a reflection of G.o.d; and the very life of G.o.d, the eternal inner life of the Trinity, is the dialogue of love. We are meant to be with each other because G.o.d is eternally with-each-other; "each-otherness" reaches into the very heart of G.o.d. Otherness, plurality, individuality, society, and thus love arc as ultimate as oneness. That is the thing pantheism fails to see: that to-be-with is the very nature of to-be; that relations.h.i.+p is not an accidental category and external addition, like time and place; that we must include in our list of "transcendentals" or universal properties of all being not only oneness but also manyness, not only sameness but also otherness, and not only truth and goodness and beauty but also love, at least in its most rudimentary form of the inherent tendency to-be-toward-another. The simplest conversation manifests the highest mystery. the Creator, the dialogue between Father and Son that eternally becomes the Holy Spirit. Life is dialogue ultimately because life is a reflection of G.o.d; and the very life of G.o.d, the eternal inner life of the Trinity, is the dialogue of love. We are meant to be with each other because G.o.d is eternally with-each-other; "each-otherness" reaches into the very heart of G.o.d. Otherness, plurality, individuality, society, and thus love arc as ultimate as oneness. That is the thing pantheism fails to see: that to-be-with is the very nature of to-be; that relations.h.i.+p is not an accidental category and external addition, like time and place; that we must include in our list of "transcendentals" or universal properties of all being not only oneness but also manyness, not only sameness but also otherness, and not only truth and goodness and beauty but also love, at least in its most rudimentary form of the inherent tendency to-be-toward-another. The simplest conversation manifests the highest mystery.

4.Love Is Synergistic.

There is no physical perpetual motion machine, but there is a spiritual perpetual motion machine: love. Love is perpetually reinforcing: the more we love, the more we are loved, and the more we are loved, the more we love. There is no necessary limit to this process. Even human love is potentially infinite, and divine love is actually infinite. There is no upper limit, no wall, to love. And there is no drag, no gravity built into love. When love wears down that is due to external friction, not internal friction: love itself has no tendency to wear down, only to increase.

We sec this in the poem in the progression of the lyrics. The more each is loved by the other, the more he or she responds with increased love, and vice versa. After he says she is "as a lily among brambles" (Song 2:2), she responds that he is "as an apple tree among the trees" (Song 2:3); and after he declares, "behold, you are beautiful, my love" (Song 1:15), she echoes, "behold, you are beautiful, my beloved" (Song 1:16). They keep capping each other's lines because they keep reflecting each other's loves.

Love, being the fundamental spiritual force in the universe, transcends all other forces and their laws. It especially transcends the principle of physical entropy: its energy does not decrease but rather increases. That is why Heaven never gets boring. That is also the only way earth can conquer boredom, too.

5.Love Is Alive.

We think of love as the product of things that are alie: love.e animals put forth animal loves, live human beings put forth human loves, and the living G.o.d puts forth divine love. Even on the animal level, love tends to produce litters of new lives, but love is not a living thing in itself. But in G.o.d it is. It is the Holy Spirit. The love between Father and Son is so alive that it lives as a life of its own, a Person in its own right, the Third Person of the Trinity.

Now human loves resemble both the animal and the divine. To produce new living persons, our love needs the aid of biological reproduction, like the animals. But it also resembles the divine in that human love is alive. It is not literally another person, like the Holy Spirit, but it is more than a feeling in a person. We say we are "in love", not that love is in us. Why? All the myths saw love as a G.o.d or G.o.ddess, a real, living ent.i.ty who could come into you and take over your life. Why? If we are old enough to remember the old Hollywood cliche, we say of love, "It's bigger than both of us." Why? If love is only a feeling confined to one person, these spontaneous expressions in our language and our cultural history are unexplainable. But if love is a real, living force, not only within us but between us, if we really are in love rather than love in us, then it is explainable. Love lives.

Thus all the images for love in the poem, as in most love poems, are images of living, growing things: a garden (Song 4:12, 16), a vineyard (Song 7:12; 8:11-12), a well of living water (Song 4:15). Love grows like a plant. It does not merely grow in us, with us, as a function of us; we grow in it, with it, as a function of it. It has a life of its own-ultimately because it is a seed of G.o.d planted in our lives. "He who lives in love, lives in G.o.d, and G.o.d in him" (1 Jn 4:16).

6.Love Is Gospel.

Love is news, good news, Gospel. Love is promise of future bliss, hopeful of future reward, forward looking to future ratification. Its words always invite us forward. Even Freud perceived this: he divides the fundamental forces of the psyche into two: eros, the life force, drives us forward, while thanatos, the death force, the death wish, pulls us backward into the womb. For Freud life is the battle between these two forces. This is the residue or relic in the thought of the atheist and immoralist of the great Mosaic vision of life as the battle between the forces of life and death, obedience and disobedience to G.o.d: I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your G.o.d, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him (Dt 30:19-20).

The drama of Song of Songs, as of life, is the drama of choice between eros and thanatos, life and death, Yes and No as the two possible responses to the Gospel of the beloved. That Gospel speaks wonderful and mysterious promises. Will the human bride believe them? Will she have faith in her divine bridegroom? Will she choose life?

My beloved speaks and says to me, Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom, They give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away (Song 2:10-13).

The response must be a "coming away" from the past, from death and darkness and the womb and sleep. In chapter 3, the bride is so sleepy that she does not respond to her beloved in time, and he leaves her to suffer and sorrow and search for him. Just as there is no sleep in Heaven (sleep being an image of death), there is no sleep in love. All the imagery in Song of Songs is morning imagery, not evening imagery: "The day breaks and the shadows flee away" (Song 2:17).

Love is Gospel because love is alive. Love is not an abstract ideal; love is a wedding invitation. Love is not something for us to approach; it is something that approaches us. We do not turn it on; it turns us on as a lamplighter turns on a lamp.

7.Love Is Power.

Closely connected with love's livingness and love's Gospelness is love's power. The imagery in Song of Songs is startling. It is never weak and wimpy, sweet and swoony. The imagery is so strong and active that it is military. What woman has ever been flattered by her beloved's comparing her to an army and a fortress? This one has: "You are beautiful as Tizrah, my love, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners" (Song 6:4). "Who is this that looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners" (Song 6:10). It is the woman, not the man, who is being described here. The "terror" in "terrible" is not, of course, either the terror of disgust (as in "what a terrible rat-infested sewer!") or the terror of servile fear (as in "what a terrible thing a concentration camp is!") but the terror of awe (as in "Oz the Great and Terrible").

There is no chauvinistic pa.s.sivity here. The bride is not a shrinking violet, nor does the groom want her to be. She is as active as he is but in a totally feminine way. She is the dawn, and the dawn "comes up like thunder" here. When G.o.d our groom comes to us with his love, we are not flattened but straightened, not turned off but turned on, not made pa.s.sive but made active. The singing of the second part in a duet is just as active as the singing of the first part. We play second fiddle to G.o.d, but that is no fiddlin' around; that is fiddlin' up a storm. As we shall see later, love's power is so great that it is "strong as death" itself (Song 8:6).

8.Love Is Work.

Love is not pa.s.sive. Love is singing a duet, and that is work. Joyful work, but work nonetheless. Young lovers first fall in love pa.s.sively, but if they are to stay in love they must actively work to keep it and grow it, like a seed that is first received into the ground but then must be tended and fertilized or it will die. Thus the bride sings, "I sought him whom my soul loves.... I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves" (Song 3:1-2). Life is a quest for love and a quest for G.o.d, and there is no car or plane for this trip. It is an old-fas.h.i.+oned quest made on our own two feet.

The most moving, beautiful, and enviable true-life love story I know in recent times is Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy A Severe Mercy. The question he is most often asked by his readers is how he and his wife achieved such a beautiful, intimate, and total love. It seemed too good to be true. We do not see such loves around us anymore. The modern world, though it talks incessantly about love, has almost totally murdered love. A stable marriage, much less a happy one, even less a joyful one, is the rarity, the exception, not the rule. What was Vanauken's secret?

His answer is surprisingly mundane: work. "We kept our love only because we worked at it." Love will not grow in modern fields without constant work. The soil is no longer rich. Perhaps the soil was never rich, but people used to be prepared to work at it. In any case, love can never last today unless the lovers are prepared for lifelong work. And that necessarily involves sacrifice-at least sacrifice of all the other things that you could be doing instead.

Work also requires patience-an increasingly rare commodity in our fast-food, instant-replay, live-for-the-present age. You cannot grow any fruit without patience. There are no instant apples.

Freud says that the two most basic needs everyone has are "love and work". That is a wise saying (though I think if he were asked to expand and explain it, Freud would not do so with equally wise sayings). And these two are one, for if work is to be fulfilling, it must be a work of love, and if love is to live, it must be a work. As Kierkegaard points out, love in Christianity is not a feeling, as it is for Romanticism; rather, "love is the works of love". That is why Christ can command love. Only a fool tries to command a feeling.

The strangest thing of all, perhaps, about our work of love is that it is both work and rest, both weekday and sabbath. Jesus made this clear when the Pharisees got angry at him for his work of healing on the sabbath. His answer told them, in effect, that you could no more stop this work than you could stop the sun from s.h.i.+ning, for it is the very life of the Father, which eternally reaches out from the sabbath of eternity into the work week of time, as he did at the Creation, Jesus' answer to them was: "My Father is working still, and I am working" (Jn 5:17). What has this to do with us human lovers? Everything, for a Christian's love is a partic.i.p.ation in G.o.d's love through Christ the Mediator. Like Father, like Son; and like Christ, like Christian. Our work of love partic.i.p.ates in the dual nature of Christ: divine and human, eternal and temporal, sabbath rest and weekday work, Easter Sunday and Good Friday.

9.Love Is Desire and Fulfillment.

Another paradox of love is that it is bittersweet. Its very sweetness is bitter, and its very bitterness is sweet. Both qualities are present in desire. Love's desire, like all desire, is bitter and painful because it lacks what it wants. If it did not lack what it wanted, it would not be desiring it but would be enjoying it. But the very desire is also sweet, a joy, a fulfillment. Merely to long for G.o.d is better than to possess the whole world. This absence is better than any other presence; this desire is better, than every other fulfillment.

Thus the bride's (the soul's) yearnings are put into the subjective mood, the mood of contrary-to-fact wis.h.i.+ng: "O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is better than wine" (Song 1:2); "O that his left hand were under my head and that his right hand embraced me!" (Song 2:6). The desire is fulfilled only at the end of the poem (Song 8:5), but the desire itself is already a kind of fulfillment. The very longing for Heaven is Heaven.

Thus Dmitri Karamazov, in Dostoyevski's novel, tells G.o.d that if he should put him in h.e.l.l, he would sing wood the hymn of joy even from h.e.l.l, "the hymn from the underground". That would transform h.e.l.l (or the Siberian salt mines) into Heaven. The song of love makes Heaven. Heaven does not make G.o.d's love lovely; G.o.d's love makes Heaven heavenly.

No one has written about this longing better than C.S. Lewis, especially in Surprised by Joy Surprised by Joy and and The Pilgrim's Regress The Pilgrim's Regress. Those are the books you should turn to if you want to explore deeper into this glorious, bottomless abyss.

10.Suffering Goes with Love.

Love naturally suffers for the very obvious reason that it opens you up, exposes your tenderest, most vulnerable part, the quivering flesh of the heart, at the mercy of the beloved and of time and fate. If the beloved is human and not divine, you will always be betrayed. We always betray each other's love, in some way. That is what Original Sin means. No one is totally reliable. Put divine expectations on any human shoulders, even the shoulders of a saint, and you will be bitterly disappointed. And not only the beloved-time and fate and life itself seem to partic.i.p.ate in Original Sin and the Fall, so that if there is one thing we can predict with accuracy, it is that "the course of true love never did run smooth". If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love-and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

But in the very act of suffering, love can transform suffering, redeem it, and conquer it. Like a flood so powerful that no dam can stop it, like a flood that transforms the dam set up to stop its flow into a part of itself, as it carries the dam along downstream, so love transforms the suffering that at first seems set up against it into a part of itself. Thus in Song of Songs the bride refers to her suffering for love and the burn marks this suffering has made in her flesh as marks of beauty, not of ugliness: I am very dark, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem; Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.

Do not gaze at me because I am swarthy, Because the sun has scorched me (Song 1:5-6).

The wounds of the resurrected Christ were not ugly but beautiful, like badges of glory, as they are in the stigmatized saints. So too the bride of Christ-the soul, the Church, the martyr (all Christians are martyrs)-is beautiful in her very suffering, as Christ was. The wrinkles around Mother Teresa's eyes are infinitely more beautiful than the makeup around a movie star's. Mother Angelica is more beautiful than Charlie's Angels.

Love increases the bride's suffering. She says, "I am sick with love" (Song 2:5). But her suffering only increases her love. For only after she comes up out of the wilderness (symbolic of suffering) in the last chapter does she attain three things she previously only longed for: trust, actual contact, and the consummation of her marriage: Who is that coming up from the wilderness, Leaning upon her beloved?

Under the apple tree I awakened you (Song 8:5).

("Awakened" is a Hebrew euphemism for first intercourse with a virgin bride.) It is as in Hosea 2: only after the wilderness, after suffering,is love perfected. Not only does love transform and perfect suffering; suffering also transforms and perfects love. The two things that seem to be enemies turn out to be mutually reinforcing allies. For only in the silence of the wilderness do we hear G.o.d's still, small voice whispering to the heart of our heart. C.S. Lewis says, in The Problem of Pain The Problem of Pain, "G.o.d whispers in our pleasures and shouts in our pains." That is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. (See Hosea 2.) 11.Love Is Free.

We all know this: love must be freely given and freely accepted. "It takes two to tango", and neither one can be pushed, pulled, dragged, or carried. There arc really only three methods of influencing other people, three techniques of "behavior modification": pus.h.i.+ng, carrying, or drawing. You can use force or fear to push people where you want them to go, against their will. Or you can carry them. Then they are pa.s.sive and you do the job for them, like a parent for an infant. Finally, you can draw them, attract them, motivate them to move toward you by the magnetism of desire. That is what the bride asks the groom to do: "Draw me after you, let us make haste" (Song 1:4). She will not be his slave and be pushed, or his child and be carried, but his bride and be drawn. He has the initiative, but she responds with equal freedom and equal value. To be drawn is as free a choice as to draw. To come is as free as to say, "Come".

Even G.o.d cannot change this, fork is the inner law of love's nature, which is his own nature, and G.o.d cannot change his own nature. So even G.o.d cannot love and force at the same time. G.o.d cannot force us to love him. The one thing even G.o.d cannot give himself is our love. G.o.d can create a universe, but G.o.d cannot create love in us, only elicit it from us. For love is not a creature, a thing created, like a universe. A thing created is pa.s.sive. The universe did nothing to help itself get created. But love is active, not pa.s.sive; free, not forced; from within, not without. It grows like fruit, by its own inner mystery. Thus the groom says repeatedly throughout the poem, I adjure you, O daughter of Jerusalem, By the gazelles or the hinds of the field, that you stir not up nor awaken love until it please (Song 3:5).

It is the hardest thing in the world to be patient about, for it is the thing we need the most and desire the most. But it is also the most necessary thing in the world to be patient about, for if it is not free, it is not love.

People talk a lot about freedom today, much more so than in ancient times. Perhaps that is because they do not know love. For lovers do not talk about freedom: they are free already. They do not desire to be free; they desire to be bound forever to their beloved. To be free from love, free from G.o.d, is precisely h.e.l.l.

12.Love Is True to Reality.

"Rightly do they love you" (Song 1:4), says the bride. Love is not only the supreme value but also the supreme truth. It is not only fulfilling to me but also fulfilling reality. Love is ontologically right. It is realistic; it is conformity to reality; it is living in the real world. We have this horrible habit of speaking as if love were a mere ideal and "reality" or "the real wold" were a loveless, ugly, hard-bitten thing-in other words, as if people determined reality, and the worst people at that. No, people do not determine reality; reality determines people. Reality is not simply what people make or do; reality is what G.o.d is and does. And G.o.d is love. Love is therefore the central law of reality, and when we love, we conform to reality.

This is especially true when we love G.o.d. This point refers to the bride's (soul's) love of the groom (G.o.d); that that is the supreme realism. The next point will be much more surprising: that G.o.d's love for us is also realism, in fact, perfect accuracy. is the supreme realism. The next point will be much more surprising: that G.o.d's love for us is also realism, in fact, perfect accuracy.

13.Love Is Accurate.

Love is more accurate than mathematics. We think and say, in our shallowness, that "love is blind". It is exactly the opposite: it is the supreme vision, the supreme wisdom, the supreme enlightenment. G.o.d is love, and G.o.d is not blind; therefore, love is not blind. If love is blind, then cither G.o.d is not love, or G.o.d is blind.

When we say "love is blind", we may be thinking of selfish love, or animal love, or puppy love. That may be blind. But agape is not blind. We must be sure about this truth, because it will be severely tested by some startling verses in Song of Songs. When we read these verses, we will be tempted to jettison the whole symbolic interpretation, for it seems that the things the groom says to the bride could not possibly be said by G.o.d to the sinful human soul. For instance, he says in Song of Songs 4:7, "Behold, you are all fair, my love. There is no flaw in you." But there are plenty of flaws in us, and we know that, and G.o.d says that in many other pa.s.sages of Scripture. This sounds like a denial of sin. It sounds as if love is blind indeed.

In another pa.s.sage, the groom addresses his blus.h.i.+ng bride, who is hiding in a rock, probably because she is ashamed of her ugliness compared with his beauty. The groom says, O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, Let me see your face, let me hear your voice.

For your voice is sweet and your face is comely (Song 2:14).

She probably thinks her face is as comely as a barn door and her voice as sweet as a crow's. The question is: Who is right? She thinks she is ugly; he thinks she is beautiful. If he is G.o.d, he must be right. "Let G.o.d be true and every man a liar" (Rom 3:4). But how can this be?

The world's second greatest love poem poses the same problem. No woman has ever been so exalted in verse as Beatrice by Dante, especially in the "Vita Nuova". Not Virgil, Dante's ideal, the world's greatest poet, but Beatrice leads Dante out of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy the Divine Comedy. Dante, like G.o.d, says to his beloved that she is all fair, that she is a G.o.ddess, that she is the glory of G.o.d s.h.i.+ning on a human face, that she is not a thing in the world but a hole to another world through which Dante can see the divine light. G.o.d is the sun, and Beatrice is the moon. What is going on here?

The historian is tempted to reply to that question by doing some historical research into the "real" Beatrice. He would find out that Beatrice was a teenaged Florentine girl whom Dante knew from an early age, that she was the daughter of a merchant in town, that no one ever thought of her as remarkably beautiful, and that Dante just happened to see her pa.s.sing under his window one day and suddenly was caught up in the vision, as if his life had turned a corner as Beatrice turned the corner of his street. "Here begins the new life", Dante wrote. But all that happened was that he saw her face. As in the hokey old song "Stranger in Paradise", Dante said, in effect, I saw her face and I ascended Out of the commonplace into the rare.

Somewhere in s.p.a.ce I hang suspended.

Is this sight or sickness? The psychologist, rus.h.i.+ng to the aid of the historian, now chimes in, patronizingly, "We understand what is happening here. It's projection. Dante was in love with love, and Beatrice just happened by at the right time. Dante projected the depth and beauty of his own heart onto Beatrice. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', and Dante's poetic eyes are full of beauty. Just as when you have yellow jaundice in your eye, the world looks yellow, so when you have Dante's beauty, the first person to come into view looks beautiful. It's not Beatrice that's beautiful; it's Dante."

If Dante were to hear that, I think he would challenge both the historian and the psychologist to a duel to the death to defend the honor of his beloved Beatrice. But more importantly, supposing that they all survived the duel, he would challenge them to a debate. He would insist that his love had perfect accuracy, objectivity, and realism; that he was right and they were wrong; that he was not projecting at all; that it was Beatrice, not Dante, who was surpa.s.singly beautiful; and that he, Dante, contributed only the receptors for this beauty. He is a great poet, and a great poet is a great seer. He sees what is. He has X-ray vision. The rest of the world may agree with the historian and the psychologist and see only ordinariness in Beatrice, but Dante sees beneath the caterpillar into the b.u.t.terfly-the b.u.t.terfly that is really there in Beatrice, the b.u.t.terfly that is is Beatrice. Beatrice.

Could Dante be right? Of course he is right, and you know it. Who knows you better, the world's greatest psychologist who only wants to use you as a case study, or your best friend who is not very bright but cares about you deeply? It is no contest. Only love has eyes. To understand the world of things, you need science and suspicion and the method of doubt: accept nothing until it is proved. Every idea is guilty until proved innocent. But to know people, you need the opposite method: trust, love, openness. Persons are innocent until proved guilty. You cannot hear them unless that is your att.i.tude. Suspicion never reaches the other's heart.

So Dante is right. Beatrice really is a G.o.ddess. And so are Helen, and Mary, and Leslie, and Jo Ann, but they do not have Dante-like poets with X-ray vision to tell them that. Ah, but they do. Their poet speaks in Song of Songs. Their poet is G.o.d.

What G.o.d says is true, and you had better believe it. What happens if you do? Suppose Robert Redford came up to you, who think of yourself as a Plain Jane, and said, "You are the woman I've been looking for all my life. You move me to tears, you are so beautiful. I want to marry you and make you happy forever." Would you think of yourself a little differently? Well, if even Robert Redford can change your dull self-image, cannot G.o.d do it alsoDare you call yourself a Plain Jane if it means calling G.o.d a liar? One of you is wrong. You say you are ugly; G.o.d says you are beautiful. If you are right, G.o.d is wrong. That just cannot be. The alternative is that G.o.d is right and you are wrong. You are not ugly. You are beautiful. What G.o.d says is fact, objective truth, utter reality.

But what about sin? Does G.o.d just hide his eyes? How can that be realism? G.o.d does not hide his eyes. Your Your eyes are hidden in time, hidden from your eternal destiny and ident.i.ty. You see only the present crude sketch of yourself. He sees the eyes are hidden in time, hidden from your eternal destiny and ident.i.ty. You see only the present crude sketch of yourself. He sees the i i completed masterpiece, for he sees from eternity. Your life is like a string pulled taut. Like an ant, you crawl along the string of your lifetime, from one end (birth) to the other (death). But G.o.d sees the whole string end on, from the end. He blinks at nothing; he sees everything in its true perspective. He sees your whole life, but not as you do, piecemeal. He sees you whole, as you see a finished painting. And the judgment he p.r.o.nounces on you is "perfect". completed masterpiece, for he sees from eternity. Your life is like a string pulled taut. Like an ant, you crawl along the string of your lifetime, from one end (birth) to the other (death). But G.o.d sees the whole string end on, from the end. He blinks at nothing; he sees everything in its true perspective. He sees your whole life, but not as you do, piecemeal. He sees you whole, as you see a finished painting. And the judgment he p.r.o.nounces on you is "perfect".

That is our destiny, according to Christ: "You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." The Christ who says this incredible thing is also the Christ who alone makes it happen, the Savior, the Way. The Way will have his way. We are to be "all fair" as he is all fair. Contentment with anything less than perfection is our way, perhaps, but not his. For he is love, and love (according to George Macdonald) is "easy to please but hard to satisfy". Thank G.o.d for both of those facts!

14.Love Is Simple.

The style of the poetry in Song of Songs is amazingly simple, even though the content suggested is amazingly complex. Though the greatest minds of theologians, saints, and mystics can explore the depths of this book for hundreds of pages without coming close to exhausting its riches, yet its point is so simple that only the simplest, haikulike poetry suffices: Behold, you are beautiful, my love, Behold, you are beautiful; Your eyes are doves.

Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, Truly lovely; Our couch is green (Song 1:15-16) To a nonlover this is supremely trite and boring. To a lover it is perfect, like a diamond. To a nonlover it is endless repet.i.tion. To a lover it can go on forever, like G.o.d himself, one, perfect, self-sufficient, "the one thing needful".

If you have ever fallen in love or had a friend who did, you know the difference between these two perspectives. The lover is totally engrossed in his love, or rather in his beloved. He is never bored. He could go on and on forever. The outside observer, however-the friend, roommate, or family member-finds the lover supremely boring, narrow, obsessed-exactly the opposite of what he is to himself.

Imagine the nonlover as literary critic evaluating the little poem above. "Behold, you are beautiful, my love"-you cannot get more trite and clicheish than that. Totally unoriginal. You could not imagine a less imaginative sentence. "Behold, you are beautiful"-the second line is even less original than the first. Nothing but repet.i.tion. We already know she is beautiful; stop harping on it. "Your eyes are doves"-silly, simplistic image. Does not even fit. Oh, well: love is blind. Let us see what he says; maybe h is a better poet than she was, at least. "Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved." Oh, no! Not more of the same! All he does is repeat her words. "Truly lovely"-again and again. Four out of five lines totally dispensable. "Our couch is green"-who cares? Certainly I do not. This is the silliest, simplest, tritest, most childish poem (if you dare dignify it by that name) I have ever read.

But now listen to the real critics, the lovers themselves. "Behold"-how startling the vision of love is! What a surprise-like the Beatific Vision, like the Light of G.o.d suddenly appearing to human eyes! "You are beautiful, my love"- exactly right, true, essential. Nothing more need be said. This is heart's desire; this is all the human heart hungers for. The very simplicity is perfect eloquence. "Behold, you are beautiful"-like the Word of G.o.d reflecting the Father perfectly, the second line reflects the first, and for the same reason: you cannot get any better than that. "Your eyes are doves"-a simple but mysterious fittingness to this image satisfies the heart even while the mind is puzzled. For only the heart can understand simple things; the mind plays another game, constructing truth laboriously out of concepts. "Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved"-she can do no better than perfection, so her response is in kind, reflective of the perfection and simplicity of his love. "Truly lovely"-how wonderful that she never gets tired of this central fact! "Our couch is green"-every detail of both art and nature is now newly lit up with the light and beauty of love. Every leaf, every bed, every bird sings the same song, the very song of G.o.d, the One, the single-minded Lover of the whole universe in all its wonderfully diverse parts. Why, a whole world view is implied in these lines!

You see, though love is not content with anything less than perfection (as we saw in our last point) and with its own perfection, yet with that it is quite content and needs nothing more. And love experiences something of that heavenly perfection even now on earth, in prophetic form. Therefore it is content even now. Though the seed of love is not yet grown, it is already sown, and it is the best seed, the all-sufficient seed, the one and only perfect seed, "the pearl of great price" worth selling worlds for. We do right to be satisfied with it rather than looking for anything else.

15.Love Is Individual.

The object of love is a person, and every person is an individual. No person is a cla.s.s, a species, or a collection. There is no such thing as the love of humanity because there is no such thing as humanity. If your preachers or teachers have told you that the Bible teaches you to love humanity, they have told you a He. Not once does the Bible say that; not once does it even mention the word humanity humanity. Jesus always commands us to love G.o.d and our neighbor instead.

How comfortable "humanity" is! "Humanity" never shows up at your door at the most inconvenient time. "Humanity" is not quarrelsome, alcoholic, or fanatical. "Humanity" never has the wrong political, religious, and s.e.xual opinions. "Humanity" is never slimy, swarmy, smarmy, smelly, or s.m.u.tty. "Humanity" is so ideal that one could easily die for it. But to die for your neighbor, to die for Sam Slug or Mehetibel Crotchit-unthinkable. Except for love.

One of the saints said that if you had been the only person G.o.d ever created, he would have gone to all the trouble he went to just to save you alone. When he died on the Cross, he did not die for humanity; he died for you. "Behold, I have called you by name", he says. "I have engraven your name upon my pam." When he welcomes you into your heavenly mansion, he will not address you as "comrade". Lovers love to whisper each other's names because the name stands for the person, the individual.

Thus in Song of Songs the chorus of nonlovers wonders, What is your beloved more than another beloved, O fairest among women? (Song 5:9).

And she replies, My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, Distinguished among ten thousand (Song 5:10).

The same is true of her from his viewpoint: There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens without number.

My dove, my perfect one, is only one (Song 6:8-9).

G.o.d's name is the uniquely individual word I I (Ex 3:14). G.o.d's image in us is our I. That this private, unique, individual thing can be nevertheless shared is the apparent contradiction of love. (Ex 3:14). G.o.d's image in us is our I. That this private, unique, individual thing can be nevertheless shared is the apparent contradiction of love.

The lover sees the beloved not as one among many but as the center of the universe; not as an ingredient but as a whole; not on the periphery of his mind's circle but at the center, standing at the same place as himself, his own center, his own uniquely individual I. Love has two I's; that is why it sees so well.

Why did G.o.d create you? He created billions of other people; were they not enough for him? No, they were not. He had to have you. He will not rest until he has you home. Even if you arc the one sheep that is lost, he will leave the ninety-nine (or ninety-nine billion) others to seek you wherever you are. He will come into your thickets and your wilderness and your suffering and even, on the Cross, your sin. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of G.o.d" (2 Cor 5:21). One of the splinters on the Cross that pierced his flesh was yours alone. And one of the gems in his crown will be yours alone. For here is how your divine lover sees you: As a lily among brambles So is my love among maidens (Song 2:2).

And your response must be just as individual to him: As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, So is my beloved among young men (Song 2:3).

That is what it means to obey "the first and greatest commandment", to love the Lord your G.o.d with your whole heart. "For the Lord your G.o.d is a jealous G.o.d." Love is jealous because love is individual. Love will not share the beloved with another, as if a heart could be divided into parts. That is why G.o.d must be infinite: so that he can give his whole heart to each of us without being divided. Only infinity can do that. We can give our whole heart only to one at a time: to one G.o.d, because there is only one, and to one spouse. Marriage is earth's closest image for Heaven because it is all or nothing, forever-a leap of faith.

16.Love Is All Conquering "Amor vincit omnia", love conquers all, says the poet. No force on earth can withstand its power, for i power is divine. The mountains, scripturally symbolic of obstacles (see Is 40:4), are no obstacle to love in Song of Songs; the beloved "comes leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills" (Song 2:8). Like faith, love moves mountains (see Mt 17:20).

In fact, the very obstacles in love's way become transformed by love into a part of itself. Onerous tasks become opportunities for heroism. As the priest tells the marrying couple in the Catholic marriage ceremony, marriage is so high and holy, so demanding of self-sacrifice, that "only love can make it possible, and only perfect love can make it a joy".

Love's enemies darken the horizon of our fallen world, and like the Old Testament prophet we naturally cry out in complaint to G.o.d. But he shows us here the vision, as he showed the prophet, of greater armies still, the armies of the Lord, bright with angelic clarity and charity, surrounding the dark host of Israel's enemies that in turn surround little, beleaguered Israel. We arc never alone. "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world"-thus spoke the only one who ever truly said what all the Hitlers, Napoleons, Alexanders, and Caesars longed to say: "I have overcome the world" (Jn 16:33). They failed because their weapons were hate. He succeeded because his weapon was love. They slew their enemies; he let himself be slain. The Lamb conquered even the Dragon (in Revelation) by the blood of his love. The wounds of the sacred heart of Jesus are the most powerful force in the universe. If our love is united to his, if we are united to him, we and our love cannot cannot fail. fail.

17.Love Is a Surprise.