Reflection This Week

The Fire of Love

No one has ever accused me of being quick on the draw although I often do open my mouth without thinking of the consequences. I have been accused of being slow on the uptake, however, and rightly so, and have often found myself being the prosecuting attorney. Sometimes it takes me a long time to finally “get it.”

When I was majoring in philosophy in college and theology in seminary, the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was in vogue. Everyone but everyone was reading him. I tried, but I found him too dense. I never liked philosophy all the while I was taking all those courses, but I had no choice. They were mandatory. I only began to appreciate philosophy when I studied theology, but I never, even then, appreciated Teilhard. He’s still a little beyond me, even as I understand him a little more.

I remember receiving a card back then over forty years ago with a quotation from one of Teilhard’s works, reading it and wondering what he was talking about. I still remember the quote. “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.”

Perhaps one of the reasons why I did not understand this passage back then was that I was a celibate. I knew nothing of love. Oh, I understood the theology behind it and the philosophical differences between eros, philia and agape. (I’ll not go into that here.) But the real meaning of love was truly lost on me and how it could be equated to fire, even more so.

But I finally get it! As Antoine de Saint-Exupery once observed: “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” I suppose I had rocks in my head all these years but can now see the cathedral. I can see in my imagination what the fire of love can do. It can wipe out poverty, famine and disease. It can put an end to war, division and isolation. It can make us what we truly are, brothers and sisters one to another.

We do not have to wait until we have “mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity”, even as if it often seems that we are waiting to do just that, before we unleash the fire of love that is within each of us, child of the All-Loving God that each of us is. We simply need to begin to contemplate and imagine what that “cathedral” will look like and then get on with it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery understood that we have to allow ourselves to image what can be as opposed to what is if we want to become what we were created to be. Teilhard understood that it is only through our loving one another as fully and as faithfully as we can that will enable us to burn everything in our paths that stands in the way of doing just that.

We are a long way from there, of course. Nevertheless, as a favorite old church camp song always reminds me – and which I also finally “get” – “It only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around can warm up to its glowing. That’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it. You spread his love to everyone; you want to pass it on.”

We’ve all experienced the fire of God’s love. Now we must continue to pass it on. God only knows what “cathedral” we can build if and when we do. WJP