Love as We Know it
In a letter to her sister Meg, Helen Waddell, ever an uncompromising seeker after truth, after the real, wrote:
‘What if it were really true that the power at the back of this cruel universe were love as we know it? It’s no wonder Dante said when he had that vision of ‘love that moves the sun and stars’ that it was tanto ottraggio, a kind of outrage of his being. For to come within the least whisper of it is to leave one gasping … it is so terrible that one almost looks about for familiar little shelters of noise and buses to shut out the stars.’
There is authority in this affirmation, a reminder that much pedestrian, pious prattle about ‘the love of God’ presenting it as an existential tea-cosy issues from lack of experience of what the reality designates in fact. Hebrews 10.31.
