Recently I asked my Facebook world what they were hankering to read a post about; the answers were few. But two friends both said they wanted to read something about love. One of them, a former college professor of mine and a drama queen in the absolute best sense of the term, said this, “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” I don’t think my former professor is a religious sort of person, but her suggestion immediately took me to the Song of Songs:
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 raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
Death has been around more than usual of late, and I find little mysterious about the deaths nearest me. A member of my extended family died after a long illness, and there may have been some small mercy that he died before the disease took a more humiliating and painful toll. A young child in our congregation’s circle had a brain tumor removed and the family faces a very different future than the one they imagined for her; their original dreams have died. Little disappointments add up to small deaths. And all this in the midst of Eastertide.
