The God of the Signs - The Sign of Love
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
The sixth sign latent in the pages of the Book of Creation is the Sign of Love. The Sign of Love is in many respects the Sign of Beauty expressed within the context of human relationships. Nevertheless, Love is in no sense coextensive with Beauty, for Beauty is understood primarily by observation of the world outside the confines of one’s own consciousness and Love by emotive experience of that consciousness mingled with and desirous of that of another. Expressed visually, the Sign of Love is what you see staring back at you at the altar on your wedding day. It is the glow that illumines the face of a little girl when she glimpses her father across a crowded room. Love is the force that shapes the countenances of lovers into curious facsimiles of one another after fifty years of marriage. Love is the conviction that compels a young husband to remain faithful to his frail, bedridden wife for five seemingly interminable years before her debilitating condition begins to improve. Love is the impetus that compels a soldier in the prime of his life to shield a comrade from the shrapnel of an exploding grenade with the vulnerable flesh of his own body. Far more substantial than saccharine sentiment, lustful infatuation, or unadorned duty, Love, in its purest form, is utterly personal, intimate, virtuous and profoundly supererogatory, the very weightiest of all elements in the human experience. Consequently, like gold to a potentate, Love is most precious to the soul of man. Indeed, as is suggested by the continuous avalanche of songs composed, poems written, movies produced and books penned on the subject, Love is the most sought-after commodity in human existence. Moreover, Love, like water, is absolutely indispensable to human survival. As any sociologist who has studied orphaned children will explain, babies starved of human contact in their earliest days can physically deteriorate and even die. That same principle of affective malnourishment, I would assert, applies to men and women of all ages: A paucity of Love shortens the length of one’s days. Love, therefore, is no mere prize to be won nor ornament to be collected. Its presence or absence is a matter of life and death.
Given Love’s undisputed preeminence in the hierarchy of human needs and desires, what lessons does its sign teach us about the nature of our world? Principally, I believe, the Sign of Love instructs the open heart, otherwise impressed with the wonders of Creation, that there is a guiding purpose to human existence and that such purpose, however mysterious it may be in its fullness, is inextricably intertwined with the pursuit of relational affection. Love’s unchallenged magnetism shines light upon the craggy path toward ultimate human satisfaction, and its call echoes upon the mountains and bids us come to yonder glory. Like the Sign of Conscience, however, the Sign of Love illuminates certain fundamental limitations in man’s capacity for final fulfillment within the context of terrestrial relationships. No matter how deeply a husband may care for his beloved wife, and no matter how genuinely that love is reciprocated, such love cannot constitute the wellspring of life, for, however redoubtable its fibers within the relationship, it is, quite perversely, wrecked with ease by the fallen hands of sin and tragedy. Human love, therefore, is either a cruel joke played upon the longing heart by a vicious world (the cynical, naturalist view) or an elaborate, yet penultimate, sign pointing to something more transcendent and lasting that, with Beauty, Order and Consciousness, exists originally and consummately beyond the realm of sight. That Love, although instinctual, also possesses and thrives upon a current of freedom, unburdened by the pressures of Order, exposes the fatal flaw in the naturalist’s system. For freedom, as a metaphysical entity, cannot exist in a universe populated exclusively, and most basically, by events and occasions governed by autocratic natural law. Only in a cosmos created by a Mind that is perfectly free and externally undetermined can Love, which binds Beauty to Consciousness in a glorious labyrinth of souls, express itself in freedom. Such logic, of course, does not prevent a naturalist from arguing that Love is essentially deterministic and thus illusory. But such an absurd polemic crushes beneath the weight of centuries of accumulated experiential wisdom, just like the proposition that the stars were flung into space and given their light by a random quirk of physics.
Next time: The Sign of Lament
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