writing in the dust

Last night we wondered whether people who do not have the love of God in them, or who have it but do not acknowledge it, or reject it—whether such people could fully feel human love. I was reading Hans Urs von Balthasar, who suggests that this is the case: God obstructs man, pursues man, haunts him with “a love that runs after him, pulls him out of the pit, casts aside his chains and places him in the freedom of divine and now even human love.” And now even human love. For Balthasar, the man pursued by God may very well have loved another person, but not fully, not in the freedom of ultimate love, which scours the ego and urges one toward the spark of divinity within another person. It is those sparks that must unite; that is the only fire that time and change will not snuff out.

I have a complicated reaction to this. When my wife and I fell in love eight years ago, both of us—spontaneously, and though we’d been away from any sort of conscious religion for years—began praying together. The prayers were, like our love, at once formal and improvisational, clear-spirited but tentative, absolute but open-ended. They were also, for all the whimsy of them (we would often laugh), deeply serious and, as my illness made clear when it came slashing through our lives, seismic. Our passion had a religious element, which danger clarified and intensified. I don’t think the human love preceded the divine love, exactly; as I have said elsewhere, I never experienced a conversion so much as an assent to a faith that had long been latent within me. But it was human love that reawakened divine love. Put another way, it was pure contingency that caught fire in our lives, and it was Christ whom we found—together, and his presence dependent upon our being together—burning there. I can’t speak for other people. I only know that I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening. And until I acknowledged that what that love was opening onto, and into, was God.