Love and Eternity

Look how beautiful you are, being at your side, truly I feel closer to God… Antonio Machín

Time and space
Time is a continuum, a non-spatial happening, in which events occur apparently irreversibly from the past, through the present, into the direction of the future. Space is a three-dimensional reality in which the whole of matter exists.

As spatial-temporal being, Man occupies a given space, for a given time. He is, therefore, a limited being because he is confined to a finite space and time because the occupancy of this space has its days numbered. Love however, undoing the limitations of time and space, makes man eternal.

Love
It is not easy to define “love”. It is a word that has been so over used and abused that it now has many meanings, some of them varying even from person to person. Fleeing from this complexity and confusion, which the tangle of different concepts and realities covered by the same word can generate in our heads, we could reduce the concept of love into two terms: more ethical, goodwill, and other less ethical or more natural, desire or attraction that one feels for the beloved.

Love as goodwill
St. Thomas Aquinas defined love as wanting the good of the other. Agape in Greek, translated as Caritas in Latin, is love that decentralizes from oneself and makes the other person the object and reason for our existence. This is the type of love that allowed St. Francis of Assisi to kiss a leper, towards whom he initially felt repulsion, and which allowed Christ and his followers to love their enemies.

Love as a desire and attraction
Uniting these two concepts of “Eros” and “Filia”, love is an intense feeling of desire and attraction, for a person with whom one seeks to unite spiritually, emotionally and sexually, in an intimate and romantic relationship.

It is true that these two meanings of love can, and even must, combine into one only. However to make things simpler in this reflection, let us put aside the first definition given since most people understand, the more commonly spoken love outside the religious context, the romantic love and not the love of goodwill.

To love is to experience eternity in the here and now of our existence
I was lifelong collector of moments of eternity, Arthur Rubinstein.

For the lovers, or those in love, every moment of staying together seems short, and they only become aware of “fugit tempus” after many hours have passed without them noticing. During these hours, when love made them forget both time and space, they experienced eternity. When you and the person you love are together, space occupied with her thins out and time stops because you lose awareness of both, only you and the beloved exist.

Only love pulverizes, makes disappear and annuls time and space; therefore eternity does not exist only in eternity, but it may already be experienced here by someone in love as proof of its existence. Human being is drawn to eternity and accesses it through love here and now in a simulated way, in addition to through space and time in a real way.

When the lovers are together they lose the notion of time and space and virtually experience eternity thus proving that it exists. Only love can lead us to real eternity because God is love. As suggested by Arthur Rubinstein, the more moments of eternity we collect, the more eternal we become.

Quality time
The time dedicated exclusively to nurturing a person, or loved ones, as well as a free time activity, a hobby. For example, a dad decides not to go to the bar at night in order to spend quality time with his wife and children; a boyfriend decides to put aside his books to spend quality time with his girlfriend.

Time is money and the time allocated to acquiring money is not as healthy as time dedicated to love; time thus spent does not make us lose the notion of time and space like love does which proves that money is not an eternal good but a temporal one; similarly, it does not satisfy us because our hearts are made to love people and not material things. Unlike human beings, time for animals is all spent canvassing for what they need to survive; mortals will we be, as they are, if we imitate them in the use of our time.

Eternity -- Love – God – are concepts that are self-explanatory. The above mentioned singer, Anthony Machin, felt closer to God in the company and in the contemplation of the beauty of his loved one. God is eternal, He exists outside of time and space which He himself created. 1 John 4:8 says that he who loves not has not come to know God, because God is love.

Whoever does not love does not know God and does not have access to eternity, because eternity is God and God is love; and if God is love then the only way to know Him is by loving. Love is the gateway to heaven and makes this earth Heaven for those who love. Since love leads to eternity, this same eternity is experienced in the here and now by the one who loves.  It is through love that we are drawn and called “to be like God”, that is, when we love, we partake of His essence and we are like Him.

Love is stronger than death
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a divine flame. Song of Solomon 8:6

If love exists then God exists because He is love; it God exists then eternity exists, and if eternity exists then love is eternal, and if love is eternal it is not as strong as death, as the beloved in the passage says, but rather it is stronger than death. The Portuguese poet, Camões, says that love is the fire that burns without being seen… The beloved in the Song says that such flames are divine and therefore eternal.

Ars lunga vita brevis, love is an art and as such it is eternal; life although brief, when it is spent to cultivate love it becomes eternal, because it is only love that crosses the threshold of death and directs it to eternity.

Camões comes to this same conclusion on recounting the biblical love that Jacob has for Rachel in one of his sonnets. Because of this love for her he was forced to serve his uncle Laban as a shepherd for seven years; after which his uncle instead of giving him Rachel he gave him Lea, the older sister, instead with the excuse that he could not marry the younger sister without first marrying the older one.

The sonnet closes with the words of Jacob who to prepare himself psychologically to serve his uncle another seven years to have Rachel exclaims: “More I will serve, if I do not, so long love so short life”. Love is in fact eternal, it cannot be fully made known in time, hence it leads us to eternity to carry out its fullness; love gives us eternity when we devote our transience to it, the time of our life.

It is also for this reason, as Jesus did, that it is possible to die from love and for love, because he who dies for love never dies because love is eternal. He who for love gives his life, never loses it; on the contrary, as Jesus assures us, it is he who wants to save his life who will lose it. (Lk. 9:24)

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC