I follow the popular "Humans of New York" page on Facebook. The comments on these posts are rather predictable: one or two people will speak against the negative commentators (whose comments are so far down that one rarely reads them), and the rest speak some words of accolade and encouragement.
A picture of a young man popped up today, and his quote made me particularly happy. It is, "Before I entered seminary, I fell in love with God. A few months into seminary, I fell in love with philosophy. Two years into seminary, I fell in love with a girl." This is exactly as things should be. When my mother tells me about first meeting my father, she always says that he loved God more than anyone she had ever met. She didn't know there still were people who were so in love with God. The reason she fell in love with him was because he was in love with God.
The negative comments were the top comments on this post. Why? How can we expect to truly love anyone, if we do not first love God? How can we trust that anyone would love us, if we do not believe that God loves us? When I take literature classes at Cuesta, my writing is most often critiqued as being too simple in theme. My teacher this summer told me that my writing and thematic choices are at a high school level.
It is all quite simple, really, and the great complexity of things lies in their simplicity. This young man loved God, and then loved true learning because he already knew the single truth, and then loved a girl with an actual love. We cannot love if we do not first love God.
My friend Hannah and I got into a texting conversation last night, and, as usual, I wrote way more than is normal for text messages. I think a bit of it, though, is relevant here. We were discussing the ideal of perfection in families.
Loving people see the perfection of their beloveds through all their imperfections...You've read The Great Divorce, right? One ghost has a lizard on his shoulder who constantly fills him with all manner of wrongness. The "real" man tears the lizard from the ghost an throws it on the ground. The lizard dies, and resurrects as a perfect stallion. When we love people we see and acknowledge the lizard, but we know that the lizard is really a stallion. The worldly view of perfection denies the existence of lizards, and therefore denies the existence of stallions. One person "loves" another, but denies all that is deeply true about the person they think they love."
When we deny the love of God, we deny the love of anyone. When we deny God, we deny love altogether.
Here's the link to the Humans of New York post: LINK
I had not thought about that passage in "The Great Divorce" in that light before. How very true though; love is not a doing away of the beloved's imperfections but accepting them and seeing through them to the perfection they can become. As always, beautifully written, my friend, and insightful. I shall have something to mull over for some time.
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