It came to me, not in a dream, but out of a dream: a dream of passionate love with a woman with an oval face and otherwise unknown. As I awoke, a double context suggested a verity. The love of Charles (Morgan) and Margaret (Rawlings), I realised, could not but end badly. Why? Because in both cases it was an ultimate love for a mortal. It transgressed, in other words, the Great Commandment. We tend to think of this commandment with an emphasis on the adverbial conditions; suddenly I was led to place the accent on the object of our loving. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength” – the Lord thy God, and no one else or less. Charles and Margaret loved indeed with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and all their strength – but they loved one another so, and that was, and is, idolatry and hubris.
For most people, this is not a danger. Most of us are not capable of such a consuming and consummate love, and would recoil from its approach. That gives us another problem, for how then shall we obey the First Commandment? But it saves us from the danger of an Icarian amour.
The Commandment remains. It is, truly, awesome. For it, 613 other commandments have apparently been abolished; more awesome still, in it, 613 other commandments have been fulfilled. If, in other words, we can so live as to live that love, no other commandment, no other rule, is needed: it is absolute – necessary and sufficient. And it is universal. But it is universal. It calls upon you and me and the retired fire chief and hunter who is my neighbor. We are not great lovers, not swept-winged albatrosses of the heart. And yet we are called to the sublime.
If this is a call and a command, what will give us the strength to respond? The answer lies in who is calling. For it is our Father who calls us, who will never ask from us more than we can give. A command, yes, but a command such as a loving father will give to his young child about to run into danger. Stop! Don’t move! He commands out of love; he commands what will save us. And when we respond, he is our place of greater safety. “Thou art a place to hide me in, thou shalt preserve me from trouble : thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:8)
Image: Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560)
