Beautiful Friend

Yeats' Song of the Wandering Aengus is a paean to lost love. But I think of it as a meditation on love itself, its expectation and possible loss, but more so, its depth and dimensions. Love is at once (and always) one's muse and one's quest. As was the case in Yeats' life, it may be unrequited in the model sought. But its loss may have its most powerful and lasting presence and inspiration in helping us understand better love's depths and heights.

Love must always be appropriate to its object and relations. I cannot love my sister as a lover, nor claim another lover when I have a wife. These "rules" help love blossom in its many flowers and facets, bringing a joy appropriate to each experience of love.

The purest, most beautiful face of love is friendship, whose model is our love in God, and whose trace is in all loves. Philosopher Eleonore Stump says, "If a person takes God as her deepest heart's desire, all her other heart's desires [can be] woven into that deepest desire." Wandering in Darkness, p. 445. All of her loves can be nested in her love of and by God. All her loves become as gifts of God's love, enlightened, enriched, enjoyed, and returned, in God's love.

My prayer is that I may love all the loveable faces I see in the radiance of God's ever living, ever loving, love for me.

Listen to Donovan sing Yeats' poem.

Listen to Jose Mari Chan sing "Beautiful Girl."

Listen to Jose Mari Chan sing "A Love Song"

Listen to Jose Mari Chan sing, "Can We Just Stop and Talk a While?"

Listen to Jose Mari Chan sing "Tell Me Your Name"