Young Love

August 12, 2009 | By Mark | Add a Comment

She was a girl going on thirteen as I was, with a mouth that turned up at the corners. If we ever spoke to each other about anything of consequence, I have long since forgotten it. I have forgotten the color of her eyes. I have forgotten the sound of her voice. But one day at dusk we were sitting side by side on a crumbling stone wall watching the Salt Kettle ferries come and go when, no less innocently than the time I reached up to the bust of Venus under my grandfather’s raffish gaze, our bare knees happened to touch for a moment, and in that moment I was filled with such a sweet panic and anguish of longing for I had no idea what that I knew my life could never be complete until I found it. “Difference of sex no more we knew / Than our guardian angels do,” as John Donne wrote, and in the ordinary sense of the word, no love could have been less erotic, but it was the Heavenly Eros in all its glory nonetheless–there is no question about that. It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

Like all children I had been brought up till then primarily on the receiving end of love. My parents loved me, my grandparents, a handful of others maybe, and I had accepted their love the way a child does, as part of the givenness of things, and responded to it the way a cat purs when you pat it. But now for the first time I was myself the source and giver of a love so full to overflowing that I could not possibly have expressed it to that girl whose mouth turned up at the corners even if I had the courage to try. And let anyone who dismisses such feelings as puppy love, silly love, be set straight because I suspect that rarely if ever again in our lives does Eros touch us in such a distilled and potent form as when we are children and have so little else in our hearts to dilute it. I loved her more than I knew how to say even to myself. Whether in any way she loved me in return, I neither knew nor, as far as I can remember, was even especially concerned to find out. Just to love her was all that I asked. Eros itself, even tinged with the sadness of knowing that I could never fully find on earth or sea whatever it was that I longer for, was gift enough.

Then, as unforseeably as it had begun, it ended. On the first of September, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, and on the third, England and France declared war on Germany. The rumor soon spread that the Germans had plans to capture Bermuda for a submarine base, and all Americans were required to leave. It happened very suddenly, and in the haste and confusion of it, I never even knew when she left or had a chance to say goodbye. The Monarch and the Queen were painted gray for camouflage, and on the Queen, I think, with the portholes blacked out and no one allowed so much as to light a match on the deck after dark, we set sail for a reality that we were forced, with the rest of the world, to face at last.

– Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

Category: Quotes

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Driving without Headlights
I don’t know what you do up here in Northern Indiana. Where I came from, on Friday nights, we used to get in our Dads’ trucks cause they used to build those trucks so that you could run over anything and it wouldn’t hurt them. You know, the old gravel roads, they just ran straight for miles and miles and miles. You never had to turn your car because you were always going in one direction until you wanted to go in another direction and then you had to wait until you came to a road to make a turn and then you’d make the turn and go straight in that direction for a long ways.

It was pretty easy driving, so what we always liked to do is go out as far in the country as we could get to where there weren’t any houses or anything that we could find. Then, you’d go as just about as fast as you dared going and you’re turn the lights out. Then the truck, in the middle of the night… It wasn’t a real smart thing to do. But luckily, they built those trucks real sturdily. And our dads always just thought they were getting beat up out in the field. They didn’t know it was in someone else’s field.

So one time I was driving from Philadelphia to Miami, Florida. I was going down Interstate 95 through Maryland, which I don’t ordinary think of as being a beatuiful part of the world. But it’s shocking how beautiful Maryland is. Of course, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning and it was a full moon and so just about any place is pretty at 2 in the morning with a full moon if you’re all by yourself.

And I started thinking about how we used to do that when we were kids. How we used to turns those lights out and drive a little bit too fast on gravel roads. And I wondered if I could still see by moonlight like I could when I was younger. So, I looked around and made sure there weren’t any cars and clicked them off right there in Maryland. Only this time, I didn’t drive too fast because I wasn’t quite so young anymore. I had gotten in the habit of trying to soak up things instead of speed by them.

Looking at Maryland I began to think of just the goodness that I was not blind. Sometimes you have to go to Maryland to remember what a joy it is to see. But then I began to think about even if I was in the middle of Brooklyn – with that moon – if there was a power shortage and there weren’t any lights to interrupt – probably even Brooklyn would be pretty with that moon. I remembered how it used to look when you’d drive in the spring and the corn was just starting to come up and the rows were real short.

You know, sometimes we think that everything is changing. But I’ll tell you what – the same moon is up there tonight. The same stars that Abraham saw – they’re all up there. The same God that put them there and made them shine, He’s still there too. And I don’t know what life has for you. I don’t know what life has for me. But I know this: I know that God is good and I know that God does not lie. I know that God has given us the gift of our lives. Sometimes we wish He would have given us someone else’s life. But He chose to give you your life. Don’t despair of it.

Rich Mullins

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