Eastertidings!

"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for one's friends."

Sometime in this last year I was suddenly and overwhelmingly struck with the inadequacy of gifts, observances and gestures to show how profoundly I feel certain loves - intense love for my children and their loves; love for my wonderfully unfathomable wife of 27 years; love and deep gratitude for my parents and sisters; love for my colleges and co-belligerents in the many causes, projects and concerns that we share; love for my buddies, for beauty, for God.

A real sadness came over me as I realized I may never find the words, and how awful would it be if Sarah, Steve and Luca never really knew - or Jesse and Lauren, or Micah - I mean really knew. How terrible if Nance never really knew, or my friends? And what would it look like if I ever were given the language to adequately say?

And then the penny dropped… “Greater love has no-one than this… “ and in an entirely unmorbid way I wondered if I would ever be trusted with the opportunity to fully express love? And if I did, would I have the courage?

Bruce Sanguin, in his extremely interesting book Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos, instructs that the new evolutionary sciences are beginning to understand that self-donation is one of the core principles of evolution.* Sanguin suggests that the cosmos has always known this intuitively, but became conscious of the principle on Easter weekend two thousand years ago, and that this consciousness is an ever-dawning one - from glory to glory!

It is frightening to think that the greatest love means the death of self, but on this day at least, I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a lover. It sounds grandiose I suppose, but can I wish for less?

Steve


*Two other principles science is beginning to understand as core to evolution are, co-operation/community and meekness. The suggestion here is that science is close to discovering Trinity (community/co-operation), Christ the Lamb (blessed are the meek) and Christ crucified (self-donation) as fundamental to the cosmos. The implication is that there may not be the gap between faith and science there once appeared to be.

(Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos / an Ecological Christianity by Bruce Sanguin. 2007 CopperHouse Press)

For another very interesting read on faith and science, check out: The Language of God by Francis Collins. 2006 Free Press. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project and works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. I heard Collins lecture last year at Stanford in San Francisco to two thousand students – brilliant.