I know many single people, widows, those home alone do not like Valentine's Day. But, for me, it is a day to think about Love, Who is a Person. Christ is Love. All love is from Him. The many types of positive love, such as storge, philios, eros, and agape, come from Him. If love is destructive, it is not love, but something else, like lust or selfishness or control. My generation read two Shakespearean plays every year for four years in high school. We started with Julius Caesar, moved to Macbeth, then to Romeo and Juliet, then to The Merchant of Venice, then to Othello, then to The Taming of the Shrew and ended up in our last year with Midsummer Night's Dream. I read the others in the summer, until my mother took away my books so that I would first do my chores. Happy days.
We also had to memorize some of the sonnets, at least one a semester. One of my favourite sonnets is one I had to memorize. It is about true love. I am not too old, or too jaded not to appreciate the fine sentiments here. As God is Love, He is in this poem as well as the two lovers.
SONNET 116
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
This is the intellectuals' dream poem. This is a poem of mature love. Mature love is complete, selfless, undying, unconditional, perfect, and eternal. The fullness of Love rests only in God,in the Indwelling of the Trinity. Those of us who have experience this, at least for fleeting moments, or as a way of life, have been blessed.
