Love is the measure.

From the particular to the universal

First, two poems - one from the beginning of (more or less) modern English, the other contemporary.

Western wind, when will thou blow, The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

This was written by the always prolific Anonymous, probably during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The next:

Wide, wide, in the rose's side Sleeps a child without sin, And any man who loves in this world Stands here on guard over him.

This was written by the American poet Kenneth Patchen in 1957. What fascinates me about both poems is that although they are separated by four hundred years, they are metrically similar; both are also about love (which, Yeats said, is the only thing other than death that adults can take seriously), and have an immediate power. One is about a specific and erotic longing, the other about something equally specific, but it moves from the specific to the abstract in a fierce and wonderful way that reminds me of Blake, as much of Patchen's work does. The importance of these poems for me is not only literary, but has to do with how we think of love - the particular love we have for the one we want to take into our arms, which has to do with larger loves.

Although love in practice can be the most complicated thing in the world, it is not hard for us to understand at one level. Whether we talk about the love of husband for wife or parent for child, there is something helpless about love, something that takes us out of ourselves whether we like it or not. Infatuation, often the beginning of erotic love, can be overwhelming and distressing, inconvenient. The love of a parent for a child is not a choice; it is a force that impinges itself on your life. Even abused children understand at some level that their parents should love them, and want to love the abusive parent. The bitterness that leads to further abuse, as in the case of the abused child who grows into an abusive parent, is a reaction to a profound betrayal, a betrayal of something primordial. There is here something close to an absolute: The person to whom evil has been done knows that the world should not be this way, that things are meant to be different, that real love never behaves like this....Love is in this sense like gravity, and where it should be and is not there is the sense of something against the grain, something unnatural.

I remember a lame defense of clerical celibacy that went something like this: The married man or woman loves one person, and the celibate is freed to love all persons equally. There are good arguments for celibacy (at least for monks and nuns, if not for parish priests) but this is not one of them. A person who has not loved a particular person is not capable of loving anyone, much less many people. That love need not be erotic, but it has to be for a particular person. Love doesn't exist "in general." "Western Wind" shows us a specific, erotic yearning; "Wide, Wide, in the Rose's Side" shows us a child, and from the child we go to all love, to anyone who loves - but it begins with one bit of flesh, bone, and beating heart.

In John's account of the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love....This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15: 9, 12). And Matthew 25 makes it clear that this love must take concrete form: Whatever we do for "the least of these my brethren" is done for the Lord. And we will be judged for what we have failed to do for the Lord if we fail to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those who are in prison. What is important is that the people being rewarded, as well as those who are being punished, do not know when they have done, or failed to do, something for the Lord. The righteous and unrighteous alike ask, "When did we see you hungry, thirsty, a stranger, sick, in prison?" Any true act of compassion - whether done for consciously Christian reasons or not, and for that matter whether done by a Christian or not - is a work in which the love of God is incarnate. And it is on the basis of these acts of love that we will be judged, and, according to Matthew 25, this incarnate love is the only criterion for our judgment.

I heard a report on National Public Radio recently that told of a remarkable example of compassion. The reporter, Diana Nyad, was part of a cycling tour of Vietnam; the tour included a number of veterans who had been wounded in Vietnam. During a meeting with Vietnamese schoolchildren, one of the tour members who had suffered terrible injuries was asked about his worst memory of the war. Most of the listeners expected him to speak of his own injuries; instead, he told of entering a village with orders to kill the first person he met who could spread the alarm about the advancing American troops. The first person he encountered was a boy of about eight, who was armed, and as the veteran tried to tell the story, he wept: He killed the child. One of the children, seeing his tears, began to weep too, and went over to him and put her arms around him. I have no idea if she was a Buddhist, a Christian, or an atheist, but the compassionate love of God was certainly present in that moment, and in the specific gesture of taking the weeping man in her arms.