Among the myriad things that didn’t have to exist — music, minds, the meadow lark — none is more symphonic, more defiant of logic, more capable of winging existence with life than love. Biologically, we could have done without it, could have spent the eons fertilizing cells without feeling. Hydrogen need not love oxygen to bind into the molecular cathedral that makes this rocky planet a wet breathing world. But we, creatures of poetry and psalms, bind differently, bind with passion and purpose, with a blessed bewilderment we call love. It breaks us and it balances us. It is the great miracle and the great moral imperative, the first and final truth of life.
Hardly anyone (except perhaps Hannah Arendt) has captured this all-transcending, all-demanding power of love more precisely yet poetically than Paul the Apostle — a saint not only in the religious tradition, but also by Leonard Cohen’s definition of the saints among us.
Saint Paul — whose central teaching was that hope, faith, and love are the fundaments of life, but love is of them the most fundamental — writes:
If I… have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
But perhaps because love is the sum total of our experience, because experience is always larger than the meaning we give it, what loves means is a question both too immense and too microscopic with intimate subjectivities to be fitted to a single answer.
It helps to be given a little guidance in how to love and a simple, perfect definition.
It helps to be given some assurance that it is never, even in our darkest hour, beyond our reach.
And if all else fails, it helps to ask a bird for a divination:
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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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