“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God”
“If music be the food of love, play on” (Twelfth Night). And no doubt, we shall! “Dance me to the end of love.” Music, food, & dance, it seems, all come together tonight. But how? Through love. The question is not about what kind of music, whether Mozart or Villa-Lobos, not about what kind of food, whether Iberian or Brazilian, not about what kind of dance, whether minuet or samba, but about love. What kind of love?
What? Isn’t love, well, love? A little word pressed into the service of many and great things, I fear. Yet we cannot not think about love. It is the challenge of this day and a challenge for our culture. Nothing speaks more profoundly to our assumptions about love than the Scripture readings for this day and this season.
Our assumptions about love? Hey, isn’t it Valentine’s day? Isn’t love romantic and sensual, sexual and emotional? It is not something to think about. Feel the love! Yet:
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
(not, perhaps, the best of opening lines for Romeos and Juliets!)
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
(this is not getting any better, is it?)
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.
There’s a challenge. Somehow love might be something more than the sensual and the physical, something more than just the erotic. Yes, but, note, neither less nor other than the sensual and the erotic, perhaps, and certainly not without romance.
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be.
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
There is, it seems, the triumph of the heart over the fading splendours of the body and the mind. But, then, there are those intriguing notes about sin and pain.
Plato, too, in his dialogue, The Symposium, essentially a drinking party where we decide not to drink but to think, uses a powerful little word for love, eros, from which derive all of our assumptions about erotic love: love as passionate and sensual, emotive and sexual. But he, deliberately, I think, chooses this word for love – there are others – to take us on an educational journey where the eros to know becomes the driving force leading us to the contemplation of truth and beauty and goodness, even to the form of beauty itself. Eros speaks to the longing of our whole humanity for the beauty of truth and goodness in spite of all our own shortcomings.
And while we ascend, it seems, beyond the beauty of bodies to beautiful minds and to Beauty itself, it is not as if those sensual aspects of our humanity are simply to be dismissed or denied or left behind. They, too, are part of the longing for perfection and truth. A perfection and truth, however, that ever remains as a longing.
It is simply one of the paradoxes of time that Quinquagesima Sunday, sometimes called Love Sunday, happens to fall on one of those feasts of secular sentiment and sensuality, namely, Valentine’s Day; a feast that actually has a kind of religious basis, too. A martyr and a bishop, or, at least, so we assume. The Prayer Book calendar is very cautious and circumspect and places Valentine, Bishop and Martyr in brackets and provides no date, dancing delicately upon the aspects of legend and story.
Yet, perhaps, in the realization of the limitations and incompleteness of our human loves as longing, we begin to appreciate the wisdom of the Scriptures on this day. “I will show you a still more excellent way,” Paul says at the end of the twelfth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians read at Morning Prayer after discoursing on the unity and diversity of gifts that comprise our life in the body of Christ. But what unites and inspires is not to be found simply in the order and structure of the community. The “still more excellent way” is love, celebrated in Paul’s grand hymn to love that comprises the thirteenth chapter read at Holy Communion. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” It is the governing theme for this day. He sings, as it were, of the divine love incarnate, the love that ultimately transforms all our human loves and grounds them in the transcendent love of God.
If Paul gives us a hymn, then, in the second lesson tonight, John gives us the theology of love. “God is love” and that love governs and sets our loves in order; it is the love which sets us in motion towards one another, the divine love that perfects our human loves despite their confusion and disarray. It is the meaning of the journey of Lent. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says in the Gospel for today. Love is the “still more excellent way.” Lent is the pilgrimage of love.
The word for love for both Paul and John is agape. But like Plato’s use of eros, the term serves a multitude of purposes, uniting all the forms and aspects of love in a new vision, the vision of love redeemed. There is, we might say, the divine eros that seeks the perfection of our loves in the agape of divine love, the love that is the communion of God. “God is love” and so “love is of God.”
Consider the story of Joseph, our first lesson tonight. Joseph was the beloved son of Jacob, one of his many sons, but especially his son by Rachel, his Valentine sweet-heart, we might say. Joseph’s story belongs to the story of the twelve tribes of Israel; Jacob becomes Israel, his sons form the twelve tribes of Israel.
Joseph, the dreamer, annoys his older brothers, particularly since his dreams seem to suggest his rule and power over them. Out of envy, the brothers conspire to get rid of him, casting him into a dry well and then selling him into slavery. Placing the blood of a lamb on his coat, they inform their father, Jacob, that Joseph is dead. Meanwhile, sold into slavery, he ends up in Egypt where, having spurned the sexual advances of Pharoah’s wife, he was, nonetheless, falsely accused and thrown into prison, where he interprets the dreams of the baker and the butler.
Thus, he comes to Pharoah’s attention as an interpreter of dreams, as we heard in the lesson this evening. Successfully interpreting Pharoah’s dreams, though not by any power of his own (“it is God,” he says, “not me”), he was rewarded with the portfolio of Minister of State and put in charge of domestic affairs. In that capacity, he sees to the storing up of wheat and grain during seven years of plenty in anticipation of seven lean years. During those years of famine, the sons of Jacob, also known as Israel, come down to Egypt looking for food. So Joseph finally encounters his brothers who had betrayed him. What will happen?
Well, there is a banquet and there is “the device of a cup,” hidden in the sacks of food. The brothers are brought back to Joseph, seemingly guilty of theft but actually guilty of something much more serious. They have betrayed their own brother and deceived their own father! What will Joseph do? Revenge or Reconciliation? Reconciliation, but only through recognition. The cup found in their sacks serves as the instrument that brings them into Joseph’s hands and into his presence for judgment and mercy. The scene is exquisite in its tenderness. Joseph, unable to contain himself, reveals himself to his brothers. They are at once convicted of their betrayal of their brother and yet realize that God has accomplished a greater purpose through their evil. “I am Joseph, your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now, do not be dismayed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” In many ways, it is all a love story, a story about the triumph of faith, hope and love over our betrayals of one another and our betrayals of God.
It is not hard to see how the story of Joseph would be seen as anticipating the story of Christ’s passion and resurrection. Divine Love triumphs over sin and death. But only through our being convicted of our sins and convinced of God’s love.
Leonard Cohen’s lyrical masterpiece, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” is also about the triumph of love even in the midst of the greatest horrors.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance Me To The End Of Love…
The song was inspired by the story of the death camps in the Holocaust when Jewish musicians were required to play classical music, the music of Mozart and Haydn, for instance, while their brethren were being led to their deaths and then their bodies to the Crematorium for burning. It is a haunting image. A string quartet plays with passionate intensity for those whose fate is their own, playing with passionate intensity the music which belongs to human dignity and beauty in the face of unspeakable and utterly inhuman indignities and horror. Like Joseph betrayed by his brothers, the Jews of Europe were betrayed by the culture that betrayed itself.
Sin and pain, suffering and loss, betrayal and death, and, yet, beauty and love. These realities cannot simply be ignored and overcome in the effusions of romantic love. No. They become part of the deeper meaning of love, the love that Paul and John are talking about, the love that seeks our perfection and unity, the love that the story of Joseph reveals, the love that seeks reconciliation and forgiveness out of the betrayals of our loves.
These themes all meet in George Herbert’s poem, Love III. The patterns of the poem are theological and yet poetically compelling. Divine love, the divine eros for our good, speaks to our wounded and broken loves and gathers us into the divine agape, a beautiful banquet of love where music, food and dance all have their place and meaning.
“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back” Why? Because it knows that it is “guiltie of dust and sinne,” images that capture at once Creation and the Fall but even more the sense of Contrition, the idea of sorrow for our sins.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.
The tenderness of judgement is wonderful here. We are gently asked to acknowledge our own insufficiency and to name our need.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I, the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
It is a Confession, a confession of our own unworthiness.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Love recalls us to our Creator and to the purpose of our being. Love has made us and he has made us for himself. The gentle smile of divine love speaks to us in the awareness of our estrangement and brokenness.
Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
We can only convict ourselves, condemn ourselves as it were. In the presence of divine love, truth and honesty override all attempts to justify ourselves.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
Love gently reminds us of love’s great triumph over all our betrayals of love. Love has borne it all. All is restored. There is, theologically speaking, Satisfaction, Christ’s death upon the Cross is for our redemption: “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”
“My deare, then I will serve,” the soul says, to which love replies,
“You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.”
The banquet is at once eschatological, “dance me to the end of love,” and eucharistic, “the food of love.” Contrition, confession and satisfaction are the patterns that dance in and through the liturgy of the Prayer Book. They are the motions of divine love in us. Love bids us welcome to the feast of redemptive love, the love that calls us out of ourselves and sets us in motion towards one another in the communion of God’s love.
We may have our surfeit, our fill, of food, of music, of poetry and of dancing tonight. It is not by accident that Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday! But let there be no surfeit of love. For “love is of God” and love always bids us welcome.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima/Valentine’s Day
Choral Evensong
St. George’s, Halifax
February 14th, 2010
‘Final Fling’