People speak of “being in love”, or “falling in love”; how about “falling out of love”? It makes it seem as though it’s this amorphous, subliminal entity that waits to pounce upon us unsuspecting mortals. If that is so – and I am here speaking only of what has come to be understood as the experience of love – then we spend a nearly inordinate amount of time trying to manage that experience.

Any regular reader of this blog will have a passing familiarity with my position as a committed Catholic. Therefore, what I am saying about romantic love in this post is highly subjective, whereas love is not. St. John tells us, “God is love” (1 Jo. 4:8), and He is most assuredly not an experience but the God of the Universe, a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet, our experience of love as a romantic phenomenon between persons holds perennial mystery for us. One of the things the writer of Proverbs confessed was something too wonderful for him was “the way of a man with a woman” (Prov. 3019).

With all that in mind, I present a poem I wrote about that same phenomenon. ‘Stepping In The Stream’ depicts the internal imbalance, the giddy uneasiness, and the internal contradictions most have known at some point in their life. I would go so far as to say if you haven’t known what I write of, you’ve been wading in a different stream.

Finally, to be immersed in this stream of enchantment is only a faint adumbration of the eternal self-giving of our Savior. And that’s what keeps us going back. We reach for eternity; it’s few who have actually been touched by the same.

What do I know of you? Can it be said

that I love you? I believe I have said

as much on the first night we met,

galvanized by the onrush of attraction;

the silent but mighty contraction of our

mutual affection that overwhelmed and

liberated our passion for something new

and alive, something that lit the dying

embers behind our eyes.

In the flurry of words there were diamonds;

vigorous promises of stalwart love were unearthed;

some for the first time. It always feels like the first time.

And it seemed as though we knew the other from forever

and a day. And now the arrival of a new day heralds

the start of something new. We begin to know how the

viral life of love is lived within our shared mortality.

We are immortal, and we are glad for it. Love is nearly

too small for what we glimpse beyond our earthly horizon.

And being bounded by who we are, we seek to be unbounded.

Image by Karen Warfel from Pixabay