On Love and Time and Life

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I wrote something to a friend recently, and want to share a version of it with... well, with more people than the words themselves will ever reach, but that's OK, as will be shown by the end, I think.

If you know me well, you know despair and hopelessness are my frequent companions, and you know that when I talk about Love and Hope, it's often with a vengeful, angry edge, like a war banner I wave in the face of the void while pounding my fists into the earth and yelling the words -- often bracketed with profanity -- "Come and take it; I dare you!"

In life, there is Love, and there is "details." If it isn't Love or a product of Love, it's just a detail, and time is no exception to this rule.

And I call it a rule, because there are times I find myself screaming wordless agonies at the sky, calling out challenges to any creator that might be, regardless of the realization that any such being would exceed my capacity and comprehension, let alone my judgments. Although, I admit it's all nothing more than a kind of exorcism to cast out the emptiness that can take hold in a world with more that should be done than it seems could ever be done.

-- And I would pause to note, should my lack of certainty about powers and principalities offend anyone, I do not mean it to. I only mean to be honest about the limitations of my understanding. --

In those moments, when my throat is raw and the yelling has exhausted me to the point I just want to sleep, I find myself searching my soul for what I know -- a grisly ordeal akin to cleaning a carcass, or perhaps simply an exercise in stripping away what is dead to find what is living. And every time, when I have flayed my flesh to the bones and am digging through gristle and guts, there in the wreckage of me I find a Love that is living and sacred and older than anything I have reason to know.

This Love is more real than agony, than pain, than death. It was born in some place deep and ancient before the first word of history was recorded, back even before oral traditions, back in some place where an ancestor we can't even imagine brought food to an elder who couldn't gather anymore, or looked at a child and felt something swell in their chest, or watched some other of their kind eating the food they had provided and felt a fullness that was better than satiating their own hunger.

And maybe there's a God behind that. Maybe there are gods instead. Maybe we are just another stage along the path from protozoa on, and the end result of this thing we've named Love will be the origin of a consciousness beyond any impression of the divine we could imagine. And again, I mean no offense by my "maybes." I simply mean to be honest about the boundaries of my understanding, and to separate with that honesty the one thing I am certain of from those other best efforts at understanding I may pursue within the finite bounds of my mental capacity.

I know Love, and the Bible I was raised with told me that Love and God are inseparable and the same, such that God is present in every act done with Love, and absent from every act done without it. And that is a beautiful thought with both wonderful and terrible implications when used as a measure of our actions and beliefs.

And it has always made sense to me, because the one thing I absolutely know is Love, and I know it as the one sacred truth I cannot hide from, deny, defile, or disgrace. I know it is in me, and yet is older than anything in my experience. I know it has outlived civilizations so long past that all the details of them are lost forever.

I know Love will outlive my short span of time on this earth, and that when I am not even a memory -- when my name and deeds are as lost to time as any who lived before written history -- so long as there is a human soul in existence, that soul will have only one absolutely indisputable truth it carries that is more, even, than its sensory picture -- particularly the parts its brain hallucinated -- of its world: Love.

Love is more real than death. And it's more real than death because the Love we hold today within us is the Love that was known around the fires over which wooly mammoth roasted and will be the Love that binds the first humans who head out to create colonies among the stars. Love has outlived -- and, in outliving, been victorious over -- empires and worries and fears and wars that would end the world.

And it would make beautiful, poetic sense to me if it all turned out that our lives are just tiny little elements of Love, just tiny little atoms of the infinite, and that we and all our experiences and all our desires and expressions and exclamations and anticipations and expectations and aspirations are just vessels, just fractions and fractures of "us," and that even "us" is just another inexact-and-almost word -- like Love -- for a concept that is much too big to fit into such an insufficient container as can be fashioned from any alphabet.

How could something so incomprehensibly vast as Love ever be fully expressed, explained, contained, fulfilled or felt outside of the entire story of all the lives that ever have been and ever will be?

Did you invent the Love you know? Did those who gave it to you create it in themselves? Will the Love you've received die with those you've shared it with?

Love is monolithic.

The Love that breaks us down and rebuilds us, that steals our deepest convictions and replaces them with understanding, that same Love was there around shared fires that chased off some prehistoric night. It overflowed from the trenches of the Christmas Armistice and kicked soccer balls across no-man's land. It stayed the hand of the Soviet officer who ignored the computer malfunction that would have brought a nuclear apocalypse. And if the day comes that humans stand on other worlds, it will only be because we did not abandon that Love in the time between.

I know nothing about the persistence of individual consciousness after death. Even more so, any certainty I could espouse about other dimensions or realms would be betrayed as arrogance by my struggle to fully grasp the world I can see and touch and feel. Yet, I know that, next to Love, time and death and decay and even the heat death of the universe itself are nothing but details.

You are never done. You are never without meaning. You are never without obligation nor released from your purpose and place in this universe by failure or sorrow or pain. You carry within you the capacity for Love, and there is nothing more sacred. Nor will the time or event arrive when your little piece of Love will be any less integral to the whole.

You are a portion of the infinite heritage of our species -- of the only thing that ever has been or ever will be truly sacred. You are Love, as we all are, and time and death and all disaster and waste and loss, next to Love -- next to us -- they are but passing shadows.