KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 February
It’s all about love
“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love/ Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of life and experience as Bruce Cockburn puts it in his 2023 album, “O Sun O Moon.” As he says, “the list is long – as I recall/ Our orders said to love them all,” referring to all manner of states and conditions of our humanity. We have in Chapel wrestled with the interrelated concepts of the love of God and the love of one another and with the overarching idea that God is love. This week at KES is ‘spirit week.’ It has been a tradition to have Paul’s great hymn to love (1 Cor. 13.1-13) read at the Chapel services that week.
It is quite a paean of praise to love and one which complements in intriguing ways Plato’s great dialogue on love, The Symposium, especially the mysteries of Diotima. She is a woman philosopher (fictional) who has taught Socrates, he says, all that he knows about eros or love as the passionate desire to know the Good and the Beautiful. She leads us up the ladder of love from lower forms to the transcendent Form of the Beautiful itself, transcending binaries but without negating them.
Somewhat like Paul’s hymn in 1st Corinthians, Plato’s dialogue turns on the matter of love not as an object but as an activity, emphasizing the lover and not the object of love, the beloved. For Paul, love or charity is an active and dynamic principle that seeks our good. The love he celebrates is the love of God, God’s love active in us perfecting our loves.
Candlemas – last Friday – marked the transition from the Christmas cycle of feasts to the Easter sequence, a transition from light overcoming darkness to life triumphing over death. Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. It is at once about a journey into light and understanding that belongs to life. But the radical meaning of that light by which we see light and find life is love. Life, light and love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of our growing into an understanding of the mystery of the divine love made visible to us in the Passion of Christ. We see “in a glass darkly,” knowing in part, as Paul puts it, but “putting away childish things,” we seek to know even as we are known in the love of God. “Charity never faileth” because it is of God.