Skip to main content

Email Excerpt: Late Have I Loved You

I just wrote this email to a friend:

There is a song by Gungor called "Late Have I Loved You" - do you know it/them? I've been a fan for several years.
I recently discovered (via Dan's Lenten guide), that the lyrics of this song were originally written by St. Augustine. As I listened to this song, and thought about Augustine's words, I was struck by the opening line. What does it mean to "love late?" I sat with this question for awhile, and then wrote a poem:

“Late have I loved you.”


Late have I come to see

and know what love is.

                I have tried to control,

                tried to use

                tried to prove

and tried to know. 


It is only after failing

at each of these

that I have loved you.



When I think about our conversation this afternoon, the question I think we both need to ask ourselves is, "What does it look like to love this person?" Not to control them or use them or know them intellectually, but to love them, as they are, as we are.


I don't want to come to understand and experience love after trying every other option. I want to cultivate love for others sooner rather than later. I want to love and be loved (I think you cannot fully have one without the other) wholeheartedly, in the light of day.

Isn't it both terrifying and beautifully compelling?
And how do we do this?
Who has thoughts? Let's share them!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thi...

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro...

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st...