My wife and I are turning 60 this year, and her birthday is coming up soon. I am working on a short video commemorating that event. I have been spending time collating pictures of her when she was a little girl and growing up, pictures of her life before I knew her. And of course, there are pictures that bring back memories of my first meeting her in college, of our falling in love, our marriage, and our life together raising our children. I conclude in the video that my wife has been a faithful and loving wife for 40 years. What more could a husband want? (Sometimes my wife needs to remind me how good I have it!)The experience of making the video has been great, because it has brought back to me why we got married in the first place -- our experience of falling in love, of getting to know one another, of wanting to be together, of planning a future together. And that experience, occurring as it did in the early 1970's, may at times have gotten lost in the shuffle as the years marched by. But bringing it back into the present -- remembering how much I loved my wife -- helps me to realize how much I love her still, and to appreciate the insight that "love is always young" -- it needn't ever grow old. In fact, as Shakespeare said in Sonnet 116, "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Love is only truly love when it is forever young.
Another way of putting this is that love is always novel, always new. But novelty isn't when something different happens, it's when something desirable happens again. (See Carron's article cited below, at p. v) What is desirable? That which corresponds to the needs of my heart. And what does my heart need? What every heart needs: love that recognizes me as lovable, as wanted, as desired, as good. I can give this love to my wife in a special way, and she to me. I can "recognize" others by loving them as well, my friends and those in need, and I look for love from them too. This "command" of love finds its source and motivation in God's love for us: Love each other as I have loved you (Jn. 13:34). We live this command of love only in the present, because we need, each moment, our heart's desire. Thus is true love always novel, in the present tense, "forever young," and "only just begun."
For more on love's being always "now," always youthful, see Julian Carron, "Christ Is Something That is Happening to Me Now," at pp. vii and viii, from Traces. ("[L]ike [] falling in love, [Christianity as an event] "does not indicate merely something that happened . . . but what awakens the present, defines the present, gives content to the present, makes possible the present. [Experience] is given to us now . . . a hand that offers now . . . a face that comes forward now. . . . Nothing exists outside this ‘now’! Our ‘I’ cannot be moved, aroused, changed, unless by something contemporaneous – an event.'")
Listen to Rod Stewart, "Forever Young"
Listen to Carpenters, "We've Only Just Begun"
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