Love Is An Absence

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

MATTHEW ARNOLD Dover Beach

More from Christian Bobin and his book The Very Lowly: A Meditation on Francis of Assisi. In this quote Bobin is aware how quickly, unthinkingly and indiscriminately we rise to praise and blame:

The word of adoration, like the word of malediction, is completely ignorant of what it names, and moreover, the two sometimes succeed each other with only a second's interval on the same lips, in reference to the same object, in reference to the same person.

The love Bobin attempts to describe, and Francis instinctively lives, is a quite different kind of love from the earthbound love found in the trappings of human matrimony:

For marriages wear out love, tire it out, draw it into the seriousness and weight that is the place of the world.

True love — that's agape not eros — has nothing to do with the self and the self's desires: 

You expect of love that it will fill and fulfil you. But love does not fill anything, not the hole that you have in your head, nor the abyss that you have in your heart. Love is an absence much more than a fullness. Love is a fullness of absence.

Love is an absence much more than a fullness. Love is a fullness of absence. These two sentences blew me away.

We are creators, we are builders, we are masters and controllers, we are influential parents, we are great artists . . . aren't we? Rather, don't all our proud and ego-reflecting creations take on a life of their own far from us . . . then crumble into dust?

For we are masters of nothing. What we create is immediately separated from us. Our creations are ignorant of us, our children are not our children. Moreover, we do not create anything. Nothing whatsoever. A man's days are to him what skins are to a snake. They shine for a time in the sun and then they come away.

Love dwells in a completely different realm from the world of trade and society, the world of ego, self-gratification and ignorance:  

The world wants its sleep . . . But love wants awakening.

Feeding Sparrows

Thanks to Dritanje at Rivertrain for pointing me in the direction of French Catholic writer and poet Christian Bobin. I started with The Very Lowly: A Meditation on the Life of Francis of Assisi, translated by Michael H Kohn. What a joy and revelation this book is, startling in its immediacy, poetic in its religion, liberating — even revolutionary — in its anti-materialism, in its attention to the humble and the holy poor, in its celebration of a careless, selfless, singing, childlike love of all things.

From as early as page two we are stopped in our tracks: We say, for example, 'Francis of Assisi'. We say it like someone sleepwalking, without coming out of the sleep of language. We do not say it, we let it say itself. We let the words come out. They come out in an order that is not our own, which is the order of a lie, of death, of life in society. Very few genuine words are exchanged in a day, really very few. Perhaps we only fall in love in order finally to begin to speak. Perhaps we only open a book in order finally to begin to hear.

The sleep of language! Something mystical is going on here, something beyond the reach of language. Language is suspect, duplicitous, is something over which we do not have complete control. Language does not serve our deepest purpose. True, deep language is perhaps only spoken between lovers, or heard in the echo of a book's hieroglyphs.

Francis believed instinctively in the equality of all living things: He (Francis) never experienced anything that was not in perfect accord with this belief in the absolute equality of every living being with all others, with the same dignity of existence allotted to each one — beggars, burghers, trees, or stones — solely in virtue of the miracle of having appeared on the earth, all bathed in the same sun of sovereign love.

God is to be found in the refrains of childhood, in the lost blood of the poor, or in the the voice of plain, simple people. All of these hold God in the hollow of their open hands, a sparrow soaked like a piece of bread by the rain, a sparrow chilled to the bone, squawking, a chirping God who comes to eat from their naked hands. God is what children know, not adults. An adult has no time to waste feeding sparrows.

All of us are significant, are worthy of our place in creation: One cannot say of anyone that he is insignificant, because he is called to see God without end. This quote (cited by Bobin) comes from the French mystic Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church in 1310 for her heretical book The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls.