Unlimited

The question of divorce figures in today’s readings. It is a difficult topic. I would rather go to weddings and pay tribute to love and all the wonderful things love is. Wedding homilies can be warm because they are given when love is just dawning. When love is young, you can wax lyrical about love. You can be wise and warn the young lovers of the traps that lie ahead, counsel them to be patient and forgiving, exhort them to love each other forever, “until the twelfth of never,” or whatever.

But what do you say when love is tested and love is lost? We might as well be in a funeral, fumbling for words that are tentative, agonizing over how we are to recover, wondering if we shall ever be able to gather the pieces from our splintered loves. When love is lost, life is lost.

Rather than walk the social and political minefield that is divorce (which will surely take more than a Sunday column such as this), perhaps we could spend this little space dwelling on the mystery of our humanity, especially as it includes our indelible weaknesses, the sorrowful reality of our infidelity, the vulnerability of our commitments, the unspeakable pain in all that has been broken.

The song by Michel Legrand (with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and made popular by James Ingram) is full of questions that haunt us:

“How do you keep the music playing? How do you make it last? How do you keep the song from fading too fast? How do you lose yourself to someone and never lose your way? How do you not run out of new things to say? And since you know we’re always changing, how can it be the same?”

Then the clincher: “The more I love the more that I’m afraid that in your eyes I may not see forever.” We may be beings made for love and out of love, but we are also creatures of fear. Ultimately, it is death we are afraid of, the end of what we so desire to be endless.

It is only right then that we confess this sorrowful mystery, the reality of failure and futility in our lives. There are times the song does fade and people do lose their way and love grows faint and the heart is no longer the same. It helps that there is a pace in all this; that the diminishment does not happen overnight. Just as love takes time, so too does its dissolution. Somewhere downstream, by the grace of God, family and community (and by dint of will and adaptive loving), many of us are able to recover and regain our bearings. But there are those who remain mired in dysfunction. We do not desire this but when the dysfunction refuses to go away, we know that the grief can lead to even greater dysfunction and unbearable pain.

Our faith in God and in our own selves enables us to see that this is the exception rather than the rule. It is this same faith that trains us to be self-honest, telling us that we cannot just paper this exception over. It is our faith in God who sees all things that allows us to treat the exception with utmost care since we are not always privy to the interior movements and complex motivations of people.

It helps to understand that commitment is first of all a mystery. In the book, Should Anyone Say Forever, John Haughey SJ writes:

“[Commitment] is at the core of the mystery that every person is…. [It] must be affirmed as part of the mystery of the person that cannot or should not be disgorged from that center. It can be contemplated but not penetrated. One must approach a person’s commitment with the same reverence each human being deserves. We associate mystery, perhaps, with our ignorance and insufficiency. But that association is unfortunate and inaccurate. We are not a mystery because of any insufficiency in ourselves – of insight or intellect or whatever. We are a mystery because we are not confined to the here and now. We are not limited by what we are now or know now. Illimitability is written into every aspect of our living.”

Our illimitability. This is our mystery. We see this every time we are drawn to what is larger than ourselves, to what is infinite, even as we are mired in all that is limited about us. We are more than our mortality. And we see this in our refusal inside to be limited by what we have loved and lost. We refuse to be defined by our regrets of the past, the anxieties of today and our fears of tomorrow.

And so perhaps that is why scars notwithstanding, we are able to love again and again until our loves love grow old well into the evening, lasting beyond the twelfth of never, overcoming whatever.