Advent, Day 22: And on Earth, Peace

The sum and summit of all love.

The theme of Advent’s final week is love. It’s possibly the one word more regularly abused than “joy,” making it harder still to talk about. It is disserved both by its association with trite sentimentalism, and by the reaction to that association, which tends to make people speak as if divine love bears no relation to real sentiment—to the human realities of passion, tenderness, and desire. Myself, I tend to think our human love is unlike God’s not in being too gentle, too heartfelt, too devoted, but in not being intense enough—by falling short in the ferocity, the affection, the genuine benevolence with which the holy ecstasy must blaze.