Love & revelation
l
Can revelation ever be a mercy?
To leave your house,
like Saul, to head out for
Damascus – and be blinded…
To claim that God (or
finding God) is love may
be as much acknowledgement as
revelation: That both destroy old worlds.
ll
Love may become a habit
that you learn to wear
and to take care of – like
refugees, who leave one element,
may learn to be accepted in a
new environment but will forever
remain strangers.
So, this is not the Disney version
(obviously)
but Andersen’s young mermaid
paid for love, by growing
feet that would forever walk
on shards of glass:
Always a stranger to those shores
and newly married to
this alien concept of
love – and all love’s
painful transformations.
lll
Anything not fully formed or
present is a ghost – a revelation,
begging for experience.
If you could not make love
to someone properly
but had to choose between these options:
To hear her voice
To feel her hand
To look at her
To talk to her
To smell the beads of sweat on skin
and knowing that,
if you picked one,
all other options would be
gone forever:
Which one would you choose,
if you can’t have it all?
(The function of ghosts is
to remind us of loss -
and of love.)
lV
… and thus in 1989
the Berlin Wall came down.
There was, as commentators said,
a rush to freedom.
Between the Stalin-statued East
and Coca Cola loving West
(despite the Wall)
there had been knowledge of the other,
so when the Wall came down,
it wasn’t like an airlock being opened,
with air rushing out or
vacuum invading.
(Still, what side of the Wall
are we, when we first find
that first & perfect lover – or the day
we have our heart first-broken?)
V
The human voice,
as set to music, is
a marvel.
If you don’t know
those tongues, how
can you tell a Muslim
funeral song from
an orthodox Greek wedding?
So, if we really heard
the angels sing, would
we then perish – drown
in beauty; lost,
as if in Heaven,
while they read out all of
the names of those who died
during the Holocaust?
Vl
Lust is like the common cold.
It comes and goes – and is
no more than a distraction.
Love is an invasion, like malaria.
You may suppress it, for a while
but it is there, forever, in the system.
Vll
The function of ghosts is to
remind us of love – and of loss.
When love invades,
it does so in full armour.
It sings its battle songs
in the tongue of angels.
The words that we still have
to learn are alien, yet feel familiar:
They scare us, while they echo
in the broken ruins of our feeble,
doomed defences – and we
surrender to it, totally and gladly.
Gratefully, we watch
this new world being built,
that we now will inhabit and
must learn to navigate.