Love remains

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear —

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Some life events are rather over-hyped, their significance overplayed, the personal tumult they are supposed to herald and their life-changing nature wildly exaggerated. There may still be something you can’t legally do before your 21st birthday, but the event is for most a quaint hangover from history. And the fortieth birthday. Some will say that life begins at forty, but to be honest, by then you will probably have tried everything that’s worth trying at least once. For me, passing the forty mark was a non-event. It may even have happened on a Sunday, a work day, so barely noticed at all. No new wrinkles appeared. My eyesight still worked 20/20. It was a distinct damp squib. Wasn’t I supposed to be worried? Wasn’t I supposed to suddenly feel the bony hand of time tapping on my shoulder? Aren’t I supposed to be having a midlife crisis or something? This middle aged stuff, so it seemed, is a breeze. 

What hubris to think I had escaped. It took a few years, but then that sinking realisation came: my life is almost certainly more than half done and I can look back and see that in the greater scheme of things, I have achieved nothing. It’s not that I have ever harboured fantasies of greatness in my life, though perhaps somewhere hidden in the depths of my subconsciousness there is a megalomaniac trying to get out; but perhaps not. 

Nevertheless, those who will achieve something, mostly have done it, or at least got well under way, before the age of 40. Shelley, our opening poet, died aged 29. Alexander the Great: conqueror of the known world, was dead at 33. Mozart, giving the world the finest music it will ever have, dead at 35, when the Beatles broke up, none of them was older than 30. Marie Curie won the nobel prize for physics  when she was 37; Einstein, dreamt up E=MC2 in his thirties. 40? Well past it mate. 

Not too surprising if one hits the mid-forties then and cannot escape a certain sense of ‘is that going to be it?’ Will that– a big fat nothing– be my mark on the world?

A depressing thought, probably a midlife crisis of sorts, but one soon overshadowed by something even more bleak when the realisation dawned that nothing I or anyone else – Alexander, Wolfgang Amadeus, John Paul George and Ringo: nothing I or anyone else could ever achieve is anything more than ephemeral, chaff in the wind, a dust mote briefly reflecting the sun as it falls into oblivion; Ozymandias bragging to the desiccating desert winds.

And so the dictators dies. The greatest of empires fall. The tallest buildings crumble, the most beautiful of artworks rot and decay. The author is forgotten, the language is forgotten, the words lost. Comes  a time when the marks on the page no longer make music, the scales are forgotten, the harmonies gone forever. The powerful and the powerless, genius and idiot, the good and evil, rich and poor, cut down like a flower, fleeing as a shadow. Whatever it is we spend our lives striving for; for family, career, greatness, art, power: all is vanity.

In the blinking of the divine eye, everything you have ever known will be lost, everything you can now see will be gone. 

In St Bede’s History, human life is compared to the flight of a sparrow at night through a room in winter; it briefly flitters in out of the darkness before leaving again. And if its brief presence is noticed by those in the room, it is soon forgotten.

In the time it takes the sparrow to fly through the room, everything you have ever known will be lost, everything you can now see will be gone.

But.

Not all is lost. Love will remain: and that the love of God.

Because God is love, true love. Not tough love, or judgemental love or any of those lying loves that render the word meaningless. But the love of God.

Get to the heart of the matter,  boil it down to its bare bones and we— our lives, our achievements—  only have meaning in the context of the love of God. We have value, infinite value, not because ofanything we can do or make or create; not because of anything we can bequeath or leave behind:but because we are loved, we are loved beyond telling, beyond our possible comprehension; we are loved by the source and creator of all things. 

Something like 80 million people died in the two World Wars. Perhaps half  that number were soldiers, men, mostly, from their teens to their thirties. Very few would have been past 30. Average age about 26. Tens of millions of lives cut short almost before they had started. 

All that lost potential, the lives never lived, the careers never had, the treasured memories never made, the children never held; the books and songs and symphonies never written. The  waste of life is an obscenity beyond compare, a scandal which cries to the heavens; and heaven replies with tears. 

And.

Still.

Not all is lost. Love remains: and that the love of God.

Because God is love, true love. Not love of country, or love of race or love of culture or any of those lying loves that render the word meaningless. But the love of God.

In the face of humanity’s foolishness; in the face of the horrors experienced, the sacrifices made, the lives lost; in the shadow of terror and occupation and genocide; after the carnage of the lives erased in the Blitz at Coventry; at Nanjing, Dresden and Leningrad, the Somme and Hiroshima: when the lie of the humanity trusting in itself is laid so unbearably bare, there is no response we can make. 

No response. 

Except to trust that all those lives, all our lives, have meaning in the love of God and that in the end, when every gun has ceased firing, the love of God will triumph.

When the sparrow flies through the room in winter, briefly in the light and warmth and noise, perhaps someone notices it in the room. And when it has flown out again they rise from their seat to look out of the window to see where the tiny bird has gone. But gazing out, they can see nothing, only the darkness pressing on their eyes. And they may return to their seat, sad for the little bird out in the dark. 

But perhaps they have forgotten. You cannot see out of a window at night. The reason you cannot see out of a window at night, is that your eyes are dazzled by the artificial light inside. In this world’s brief light, in this world’s brief life, you cannot see the bird any more; but the sparrow flies on.

And when the light of this life has gone love will remain: and that, the love of God.