Love’s Conquest of the Cosmos

Getting ready the other day to fly out to Denver for our son’s wedding, I found myself mulling over what exactly I might be expected to say at the rehearsal dinner. At the very least I should tell everyone what an honor and joy it is to be here in order to pay tribute to the love of two people united in a sacrament made by God which we are privileged to witness.   

Yes, but then what? And all at once I had this sunburst which hit me square between the eyes. Why not a reflection on the fact that while certainty about the physical world is useful and important to have, it becomes less and less relevant up against the need for moral certainty, particularly when two people are about to get married? And so, setting down a few thoughts along those lines, here is what I said:

Is it (I began by asking) really the earth that spins each day about the sun, or mightn’t it rather be the sun that does its daily dance around the earth? I am wholly familiar with the claims of modern science, it is just that I choose not to believe them. And never mind that here were the greatest minds that ever lived, so many eminent men of learning from Copernicus to Galileo to Newton, right down to the local high school physics teacher. I simply cannot credit their claims. Not in any ultimate sense, I cannot. 

Who are they, after all, to tell me, and I suspect every other clear-sighted creature on the planet, that we must discount the evidence of our own eyes? That we must simply go along with the so-called experts who insist that it is only the earth that moves and not the sun? Why should anyone want to do that? It is the sheerest lunacy.   

And so if anyone cares to know, I will tell them straightaway: I live in a perfectly Ptolemaic universe. And what is more, I can easily prove it. 

Each morning, for example, on my drive east into town to teach, I must put on my sunglasses owing to a certain bright ball appearing in the sky. And at the end of the day, driving west, I put them back on in order to shield my eyes against the same blazing ball as it prepares to drop below the horizon.

So I ask you, what on earth has the sun been doing all this time but moving steadily across the heavens from one end of the planet to the other? Is that not evidence enough to put to rest the pretensions of the so-called experts? And such pleasure I take in watching it all happen, too!

Here we enter the realm of divine mystery. Because if it isn’t the sun that moves the earth and the planets and all the stars above, what then is moving them? The answer is Love, of which Dante is the great representative figure in the literature of the Christian West. Which is why, on the very last line of the final canto of the Paradiso, he tells us: “It is love which moves the sun and the stars.” 

Now isn’t this the one great certitude on which everything in the universe finally depends? Not science or mathematics; nor any impersonal force at work in the world. But love. And that God is Himself this Love, which is why when two people commit themselves to one another before God they move in a kind of rhythmic dance round this Love.   Now isn’t this the one great certitude on which everything in the universe finally depends? Not science or mathematics; nor any impersonal force at work in the world. But love. Tweet This

It takes three to get married, is what I’m saying. And thanks to God’s own Spirit, who spirates the love between the Father and the Son, then freely bestows this love upon the man and the woman joined in the sacrament of marriage, the resulting union becomes an icon no less of God’s own life and love. Not even the ravages of time will outrun the love of two people wedded to one another in Christ. Whose Cross, to quote a famous Carthusian saying, “stands steady, while the world spins.”    

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)

We could all live quite happily, is what I am saying, without any of us having known the details of the heliocentric theory of the universe. Whether it be true or not scarcely affects the movements of the human soul. Let the scientists have their say, it matters not one whit to me. The sum of human happiness does not depend on my accepting the diminished place of the earth in the scheme of the cosmos. But lose the least bit of certainty concerning the order of the moral universe and the chaos that follows will unhinge all that is precious and true. 

Not to know what is true about another person, to remain unsure in those judgments of the heart that bind one person to another, is the most terrible loss of all. It is the worst possible affliction that can befall any human being. What else have we got to go on, for grace to build upon, if not the words spoken between two people determined on spending their lives together? If we can no longer depend on that, if we stop trusting that the promises we make before God and our families and friends are true and binding, then we might as well go off into the wilderness and, like the animals of the jungle, live on fear and instinct alone.

It is not given to us to know what tomorrow holds, but we have it on faith that it will be God Himself who holds it all together in His hands. And thus we have come here to pray for you and to witness and celebrate the love that first drew you together and today brings you to this sacred moment and place. God bless you both!