Tag: love

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This is the birth day of life and of love and wings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I read this amazing e.e. cummings poem (from Complete Poems 1904–1962) in Janet Morley’s The Heart’s Time this morning, only to find that it also featured as part of the Easter Eucharist led by Peter Francis at Gladstone’s Library this morning. An unexpected blessing!

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A cozy, empty hut in the forest

We Keep Each Other Happy

Like two lovers who have become lost
In a winter blizzard

And find a cozy, empty hut
In the forest,

I now huddle everywhere
With the friend.

God and I have built an immense fire
Together.

We keep each other happy
And warm.

From: Hafiz, The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems

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Giving up control

Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two – love and controlling power over the other person – are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality

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Time to wonder

Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary:

The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and remained almost indifferent to the noise the world made or the stamp the previous days had left on us.

On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth.

Mary, the narrator, also reflects on ‘the peaceful night after the day when we had renewed ourselves, when our love for each other, for God and the world, had deepened and spread’.

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Looking into one another’s eyes

In his essay ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community’, Berry laments contemporary society’s ‘gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eyes, to the specifically sexual anatomy’, noting that

the countenance is both physical and spiritual. There is much testimony to this in the poetic tradition and elsewhere. Looking into one another’s eyes, lovers recognize their encounter as a meeting not merely of two bodies but of two living souls. In one another’s eyes, moreover, they see themselves reflected not narcissistically but as singular beings, separate and small, far inferior to the creature that they together make. In this meeting of eyes, there is an acknowledgment that love is more than sex.

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An idea so far not accepted

‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’ … It is an idea given to our civilization but so far not accepted.

Wendell Berry, ‘Peaceableness toward Enemies’, in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community