The heart of the universe

Another winter day and the world turns slowly toward spring, a sleeping beauty wakening to her long awaited lover. And morning by morning I wake to my own two grinning suns and the warmth that is their love.

And I can't help thinking, that at the heart of the universe, love is the most powerful reality there is.

Where does this come from?

We with the soul breath of life in our lungs, we long for it, grieve its loss, relish its nearness, suffer for its grasp, suffocate without it.
There is no substitute for love.

Where does this come from?

This world can be a confounded mess, and yet in these troubles and terrors there is one thing that breaks through the darkness, and every child knows this secret
- it is love.

Love overcomes and outlasts even death.
This, we with beating human hearts, know.
And if we know it not in experience, yet we long for it as a lost homeland.

Where does this come from?

Woven somehow into our nature,
marked somehow with a primordial kiss,
drawn by an invisible thread,
fingers tracing letters in the air. . .

God is Love.

And if it does not come from God, then from where?

Not from survival of the fittest, or the onward, merciless march of history.

But sacrifice of the fittest.
There evil stopped dead in its tracks,
where heaven and earth's history met in a blaze of glory.

Not letters in the air, or words in the sky of an abstract heaven,
but The Word
Made Flesh,
one Man
Who
Loved
Us
to
Death.

A love strong enough, pure enough, the original and best.
Outrageous, overwhelming, overcoming love.

And we saw this love and our hearts leapt within and the whole universe made sense in that instant we looked at the cross.

This is the shape of everything, right the way down.

Somehow the birds know it, in their joyful dive toward the earth,
and the river knows it, racing down and down to the freedom of the sea,
and the earth groans for what it has seen beneath the surface,
and the trees fling the late afternoon sun into patterns on the floor,
and my eyes, dazzled, might have seen a face in the play of light and shadow,
the image of the invisible burned into my mind's eye,
the shape of a man,
the shape of a cross,
the shape of love.

I blink, and the world goes on spinning,
and this reality spins inside me,
with its own gravity sending me delightfully off balance,
as only love can do.


~lg