Veni Sancte Spiritus

When I first heard this at the opening of Shadowlands, I thought it was an actual piece of ancient church music. But it was composed by George Fenton for the movie.

This is one of my all-time favorite movies: I had the VHS for many years and played it until I wore it out. It's the true story of C.S. Lewis and his beautiful love and too-brief marriage with Joy Davidman, a divorced American poet 17 years his junior.

In his younger years, Lewis wrote warily, almost dismissively, of romantic love. In The Allegory of Love, he takes the cynical view (still quoted by pragmatic-minded Christians who choose to disregard his later, more developed thoughts on the subject) that romantic love is naught but an invention of medieval Western culture. But after Joy had changed his life, he took a different view. In The Four Loves he writes:

“Now EROS makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.” 

And of Joy, after her death, he wrote:

"We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me."

It's amazing how coming up against a bit of reality can challenge our most dearly-held idealogical idols. Like the old adage about atheists in foxholes. "We must kill our darlings," as they put it in creative writing circles.

I particularly like this comment by another blogger:

"The truth is this… Eros represents the love of God towards man. He is fixated on us individually, specifically, He considers us to be His BELOVED. NO ONE else will do, He is captivated by our beauty, by our unique and irreplaceable worth… it’s only the third of the four love words the Greeks had to describe love, and the bible reflects those words in a myriad of ways to begin to paint a beautiful portrait of God’s “Feelings” towards us. His commitment to honor and love and pursue us forever. No wonder it’s been co-opted by our enemy to become something tarnished and dirty and shameful. It’s time we take it back!" (http://roadtripparenting.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/reclaiming-romantic-love-cs-lewis-on-eros/)

Or, as my mother says:

"Deep down, every woman knows that the way it's SUPPOSED to be is that when a man is truly in love with her--when he's the one she's really supposed to be with--he forgets every other woman in the world and couldn't care less about them. But they're afraid to believe it, because every man they've ever met has let them down."

Yep, that's the way it's supposed to be, because a man's love for a woman is supposed to be a reflection of Christ's love for his Church. Or as close as a mere man can get to it, anyway. We all fall short, but a few of us at least give it a heroic effort. And pray for God's grace, and the Beloved's, to make up the rest.