Love: The Engine that Drives the World

Taj Mahal: "Jewel of Muslim Art" Built for Love

Love is the engine that runs the world; sometimes it’s love of money or of power. But those prove to be unsatisfying in the end. Romantic love is the love most faithful in proving that desire can often lead to fulfillment. History is full of myth, legend and stories, fiction and nonfiction, of hearts that learned to sing and worlds that turned under the power of love.

One of the oldest stories is Homer’s tale of The Odyssey and Odysseus’s return to Penelope after ten years of war and ten more years of a fantastical journey. One of my favorite parts of the story is when Penelope, after his return, is testing him to discover his true identity. After a twenty-year absence she needs to be sure. She requests their marriage bed be moved. Only Odysseus would be aware that the bed could not be moved because it was built on the foundation of a living olive tree. Odysseus said as much and thus the couple was reunited.

This story is not only filled with imagery and metaphor that speaks into the deep places of our soul, but it also shows that epic love and epic story are woven together in a way that cannot be disentangled. Indeed, much of the epic nature of love is embedded in the very Universe.

In the myth of Persephone, which portrays her as the personification of vegetation, the god Hades fell in love with her and carried her to his home in the underworld. In Persephone’s absence the lack of vegetation caused the people to hunger. Zeus stepped in and Persephone was released, though she was compelled to return each winter for a portion of the year. The cycles of agriculture turn on the story of Persephone and Hades.

I was in elementary school when I saw Gone With the Wind for the first time. For many months afterwards I had a recurring dream that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler were reunited and that he took back those now famous words, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” That love story would have embedded itself in my subconscious no matter what the setting. The dynamics were classic. But I have come to understand that setting matters. This love story set against the epic backdrop of the Civil War, with its larger than life cinematography and dramatic musical score went several layers deeper because of its position as a thread in the larger tapestry of history.

Classic love stories stay with us: Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. They stay with us largely because their local story pulls us into a larger story, a story of archetypal proportions that resonate at a level below our consciousness. We are moved in a way that we can’t explain.

This engine that runs the world, this archetypal love is trying to tell us something about the all-encompassing realities that we deal with in life, even something as profound as Life and Death.

The infatuation stage of love feels like life and death to be sure. Yet when we are past that stage, when the flame becomes an ember, those same issues are still at stake in our ordinary lives. That’s how life really is. We are either living or not living, not really alive every day or not when we do dishes or scrub the floor. The profound is hidden in the mundane. And we learn that lesson through love’s changing seasons. Through the infatuation phase and the long-term commitment phase of a partnership, love is still the engine. That crazy Helen of Troy, Romeo and Juliet kind of love is training us how to live in this world with passion, how to give ourselves completely to all the types of beauty that our heart becomes enamored with.

What is Love’s Engine training you for right now?

Writing Prompt for the Week: The Profound Hidden in the Mundane