love – Page 11 – Karl Möller

16/03/2013

There is no choice then

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious
or boastful
or arrogant
or rude.

It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.

It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.

Love never ends.

These words from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13:4-8) have to be among the most challenging but also the wisest and truest comments ever made about love, true love, that is, love that fully deserves that name.

In ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’, an essay I have referred to before, Anne Carson offers her own reflections on love, self and God in connection with the mysticism of Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil. She notes, rightly, I think, that almost everything that passes as love is little more than self-love.

True love is characterised by patience and kindness. It cares for the Other, whoever that Other may be (love does not discriminate between who is, and isn’t, lovable), and does not insist on its own way. It bears, believes, hopes and endures everything; and it never ends. Now that is a challenge!

Yet, says Paul, I can have all knowledge and understanding, all faith even, but if I ‘do not have love, I am nothing’. There is no choice then, is there? It also is the most worthy of goals.

14/03/2013

Everything that one can tell of God is as much lying as it is telling the truth

Anne Carson’s essay, ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’ (in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera), offers some intriguing thoughts on love, the self, God etc., while at the same time engaging in interesting ways with the three women mentioned in the title. She quotes Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace) as saying:

God gave me Being in order that I should give it back to him. … God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.

Having read Weil’s Waiting for God a little while ago, I am quite tempted to add Gravity and Grace to my burgeoning reading list as well.

Carson also quotes Marguerite Porete, who says of God that ‘His Farness is the more Near’. Carson comments:

I have no idea what this sentence means but it gives me a thrill. It fills me with wonder. In itself the sentence is a small complete act of worship, like a hymn or a prayer.

Porete’s phrase captures the tension of divine transcendence and immanence well, but I also love the way Carson expresses her fascination with it. On the same theme she once again quotes Weil, who remarks that ‘God can only be present in creation under the form of absence’.

Here, finally, is another Porete quote, this time expressing her apophatic theology:

For everything that one can tell of God or write, no less than what one can think, of God who is more than words, is as much lying as it is telling the truth.

13/03/2013

How about this as a definition of love?

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

Thus Anne Carson, in ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’ (published in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera)

09/03/2013

Hope is a participation in the very life of God

Hope is not logical, but a ‘participation in the very life of God’ (just like faith and love, which were called ‘theological virtues’ as opposed to virtues acquired by practice, temperament, or willpower). That doesn’t mean we should not practice being hopeful, but it is still not a matter of pure willpower. Faith, hope, and love are always somehow a gift – a cooperation with Someone Else, a participation in Something Larger than me.

Richard Rohr, ‘Some Effects of Mystical (“Experiential”) Encounter’ (Richard’s Daily Meditations, 9th March 2013)

09/03/2013

The time is now

The time is now, the forever now, for all of us to be engaged. To love fully, to be mindful, to care, to show up for this life.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘The New C-Word’

07/03/2013

Best Reads 2013. IV: Anne Tyler, The Beginner’s Goodbye

You probably wouldn’t read Anne Tyler for the plots of her novels. It’s not that nothing happens at all, though it would be fair to say that nothing much tends to happen. In any case, the plot is not what makes her books special. So why would you read Anne Tyler? Characterisation, I’d say, it’s all about characterisation.

The Beginner’s Goodbye is a novel about love and loss, grief and also, eventually, hope. When Aaron, an intriguing character, who stammers and suffers from the effects of polio, loses his wife (and house) in a freak accident, he finds his life drained of purpose and meaning.

The story is told from his perspective, the perspective of quite an ordinary kind of guy. And this, for me, is what makes the book special. Tyler deftly avoids the trap that all too many writers have fallen into, of using their characters as mouthpieces for their philosophical reflections, reflections that can easily become too sophisticated for the characters that are made to think and share all those amazing insights. Aaron is not cast in that way. Yes, he does offer us his reflections on life, love, grief and lots of other things (how could he not after all that’s happened to him?), but there is an ordinariness about him that makes him utterly real and believable.

Tyler has once again excelled at characterisation and come up with yet another very gentle book, to mention another one of her trademarks. Here are some of the little gems that Aaron dispenses:

… I had first tried to do without her – to ‘get over’ my loss, ‘find closure,’ ‘move on,’ all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable.

‘Reading is the first to go,’ my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress.

That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

As it turns out, Aaron grieves the loss of a marriage that had been far from perfect. It doesn’t get much more real than that, does it?