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By Root 313 0

looked out into the audience, her head tipped attentively, the attitude of a schoolmistress listening for answers. “A bolt of lightning,” she said, as if repeating what she heard for the benefit of the rest. “And—oh, yes, I see, a baby who doesn’t weigh enough. And”—her eyes shifted—“a woman who wishes she weighed less. And a brilliant hot summer’s afternoon when the sun bouncing off the street hurts the eyes. And the first gleam of sunrise, and the difficulties of an artist to capture the essence of a place in its light, and a man—” She did a double take, and her lips twitched. “A gentleman looking forward to igniting his cigar when this is over,” and she smiled with the hall’s laughter. “ ‘In the beginning,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘God created the heavens and the earth; And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; And God said, ‘Let there be—’ ”

She stopped abruptly, holding the silence for several long seconds.

“If all these images can come from the word light, how many more from the word love, a thing invisible but for the movement it creates, a thing without physical reality or measurement or being, yet a thing which animates the entire universe. God is love. God creates, and when He sees His creation, He loves it and calls it good.

“The love of God, the joy God takes in Creation, is incomprehensible to us. We can catch a glimpse of it, at rare moments, and be left thirsting and alone, kept from the beauty and the power of divine love by the shackles of responsibility and weakness and doubt. But the soul thirsts, we thirst, and we look for the weak reflections of divine love where we might find them, that if we cannot have our thirst quenched by a gushing, pure stream, at least we might survive on the water from ditches.

“The forms of love are many, the faces of God infinite. A mother putting her baby to the breast is participating in the love of God. A child who finds a newly hatched bird under a tree and lays it back into its nest is participating in the love of God. A fox out in the moonlight stealing a chicken to take home to its young is a movement in the love of God. Two bodies in the night, moving in the dance we call love are, if the motive is pure, reaching for the reflection of divine love which they see in one another.”

She waited calmly for another inaudible swell of reaction to die down, then went on.

“We are born in water, and we spend our lives thirsting. We are like a woman out hoeing her field, a woman who is hot under the sun, who knows where the stream rises up pure in the hills but who drinks from the slow-moving, weed-choked waters nearby because the source is so far away and there is weeding to be done and soon it will be time to go home for supper. Is the farmer wrong to settle for less? No, of course not. The weeds must be chopped or the children will starve.

“But once, just once, should not that farmer lay down her hoe and walk off into the cool hills to lie down with her face in the water and drink her fill, then go home after dark with her eyes aglow from the memory of that one perfect moment when her thirst was quenched absolutely? Will not that memory sustain her? Will she not taste the echo of its cool sweetness every time she draws from the muddied water and be strengthened? Jesus called it living water and said we would not thirst again.

“Once we have tasted the love of God, its sweet flavour persists in all the lesser forms of love that we come across as we work our fields. We taste it everywhere, in greater or lesser concentration, and we try to find ways of making it flow into us more fully. And that is when we discover that the flow of love, like the flow of a stream, suffers from being blocked up and kept to one’s self. Water dammed up becomes stale, dank. Love not given out becomes dead and slimy. When we express our love, when we act as conduits for divine love, then the love within us is continually renewed, refreshed, restored.”

Margery Childe spoke of love for a solid hour, holding