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Star Quality |
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Star Quality We have a tendency to idolize record-holders in our society. Legions of sports fans follow the statistics of their favorite sport with remarkable intensity. Yet, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the death of one record-holder, some years back, attracted scant attention. His name was Glynn Wolfe. You’ve probably never heard of him. He died alone, in Los Angeles, at the age of 88. No one showed up at the morgue to claim his body. The city had to pay for an unmarked grave. Now this may seem unusual, because Mr. Wolfe was a bona fide world record-holder. He had achieved a certain level of fame — or at least, notoriety — in his 88 years. The Guinness Book of Records described Glynn Wolfe as “the Most Married Man.” He had no fewer than 29 marriages. This means that, 29 times in his long life, Mr. Wolfe walked into a church — or appeared before a justice of the peace — and pledged lifelong faithfulness to one woman. Yet, for him, it never quite worked out that way. (You have to wonder about the judgment of wives 27, 28 and 29 — although, as the poet says, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast ...”) When Mr. Wolfe died, he left behind children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, quite a number of living ex-wives, and ex-in-laws too numerous to count. But when Glynn Wolfe died, he died alone; nobody showed up to claim his body. Mr. Wolfe is an extreme example, of course; but he does exemplify a certain malady affecting a great many people in our society. In love with love We’re a society in love with love. To see how true that is, you have only to walk into the drug store this time of year. Rack upon rack, shelf upon shelf, of Valentine’s cards, chocolates, stuffed animals, scented candles, costume jewelry and hoochie-coochie trinkets. Many of us make that pilgrimage to the card store every year. There we find ourselves, in the company of perfect strangers, thumbing through the same mass-produced cards, each of them expressing the most intimate of thoughts — hoping to find just the perfect words for our wife, husband, parent, child or lover. We’ll search through the gushy hearts-and-roses cards. We’ll examine the ones in the section labeled “Romantic”. We’ll look over the ones that begin with a kind of apology (“We may have had our ups and downs, my dear, but we’ve lived to tell the tale”). We’ll examine the funny cards, the serious cards, even a few offering a religious sentiment: “May God bless you, my love, on Valentine’s Day.” The heart symbol — so central to those Valentine’s cards — goes back farther than history itself. The Symbols.com website, which is an online symbols dictionary, says of the heart: “Its meaning for the people living in Europe before the last ice age is not known, but since these Cro-Magnons were hunters, one can be reasonably sure it meant that life-sustaining organ pumping around the blood of the organism every second of its lifetime.” Maybe those Cro-Magnons already knew what the article goes on to say: that the heart is “well known throughout the Western world as a symbol for togetherness or love.” A new symbol You’d think, with the profusion of Valentine hearts all around us, we wouldn’t have any problems with love in our culture — but, as we all know, nothing could be further from the truth. Ask any of Glynn Wolfe’s surviving wives. They could tell a few stories about love gone wrong. Maybe what we need to do is adopt an alternative symbol for love, one that makes more sense to those who have seen one too many meaningless valentines in their time. Here’s an alternative: the star. You’ll find it in today’s scripture reading, from 2 Peter. This latest of all books in the Bible speaks of a time to come when “the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” The “morning star,” of course, is Jesus Christ. That label, incidentally, is found in one other place in the New Testament. The book of Revelation has the risen and exalted Christ announcing: “I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning Star.” The amateur astronomers among us know what the “morning star” is: It’s the planet Venus, which often appears just above the horizon, in those pale, gray moments before the dawn. Venus appears as a bright star, a herald of the dawn that is to come. To the ancients — shepherds encamped on a quiet hillside, or soldiers out on all-night sentry duty — the appearance of the morning star signaled that daylight was not far off. It spoke of hope and confidence that what appears now as gloom and darkness is short-lived. If the star we choose is the “bright morning star” — Jesus Christ — truly we would find that strength for living and for loving. Many of us know that the Greek language, the language of the New Testament, has several different words for love. There’s philia — the love of friend for friend; eros — romantic or sensual love, from which our word “erotic” comes; and then there’s agape, the highest love of all: a totally selfless, altruistic kind of love, the love demonstrated by Christ on the cross. Our faith honors all three kinds of love: But of the three, agape is clearly superior. If an intimate partnership — be it marriage, or friendship, or family — is to thrive, it’s got to have Christian love, agape, at its core. Not just any old love will do — not Cupid-love, not Valentine’s love, not X-rated movie love — but only Christ-like love. And you can’t find that Christ-like love without knowing Christ. Hard work This is not to say that love is easy, or instantaneous, because it’s not. A good bit of the time, it’s hard work. But, like any work that’s worth doing, it also brings joy in its accomplishment, joy greater than any other accomplishment in this life. Success in loving means recognizing the complexity of the person we love. It means acknowledging that this person is not the same as us; that, in the words of Rainier Maria Rilke, “Even between the closest people infinite distances exist.” Once we acknowledge that truth, Rilke says, “a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” There’s wisdom in those words: in the observation that truly loving another involves not just loving the other directly, but loving also the expanse that separates the two of us, the differences between us in which love is a dare, a challenge, an adventure. It’s not enough simply to show up one day with a heart-shaped box of chocolates — although, as any lover will tell you, that surely doesn’t hurt! It is the ongoing relationship, yes, even the routines — the sheer “dailyness” of living together — that makes the difference. That’s something our friend, Mr. Wolfe, the “Most Married Man,” apparently found hard to understand. He spent much of his life chasing after a mistaken and very shallow ideal of freedom. Like many in our culture, he equated freedom with options, with having a great many choices, ever arrayed before him. In this life, the deepest sort of freedom consists not in flitting suddenly from choice to choice, but rather in making the same choice, day in and day out, throughout our lives. Those who are most successfully married, or who are most truly friends or family together, are those who realize they do have a choice, each day of their lives, whether or not to stay in that relationship — and who do choose their beloved, again and again, come what may. It’s not vows shared, once upon a time, that keep a couple together, but, rather, it is vows ceaselessly renewed, day after day, week after week, year after year — a continual and joyful choosing of the other. It’s not so much in the running out and purchasing of a lacy, frilly valentine (or some other elaborate gift) that love consists, but rather in the steady, daily rising of a star: the morning star, Jesus Christ, who rises in our hearts. |
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