VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13
A Great Love Remains in the Human World, the Book Closes
The last chapter gathered the words left for the future into a trust and a faith, and at the end led the whole book to its final layer: to leave that one great love, the love that runs from beginning to end, in the human world, with all solemnity. The three sections of this chapter are the closing of this book, of these seven volumes of Justice Way. First, how a great love remains in the human world: not by one person or one book lasting forever, but by the five staying alive in the hearts of one generation of real humans after another, each lamp lighting the next. Then, how that great love comes down to the plainest line: there is love in the human world, and all the lawmaking, all the care, is to guard this one line. Last, the final page of the whole book, the words that great love has last to say: The human world is full of love. The human world is full of hope. In the human world, there is you. And that is enough.
Section One first breaks a hope. People age and go, books crumble and scatter. Pin the whole hope of a great love's remaining on one person, one book, and that hope must fail. A great love needs a vessel longer-lived than any person's years, more enduring than any book's frame, and that vessel is one generation of real humans after another, born and born again without end. A great love is no dead thing to be locked in a box. It lives in one heart after another, and flows from this heart to the next. Every heart it lights is both a dwelling of it and a ford from which it crosses to the next heart. The section also points out how a great love differs from gold and jade and fine things: give a treasure to another, and your own hand holds a share less, but a great love grows the richer the more it is given. One lamp lights another, its own light not one share the less, and the human world has one more lamp of brightness. Though the first lamp has gone dark, its light, through the passing, burns on. Here there is comfort, and there is also a charge. At the end, it turns back to the hope of this book: it is willing to be forgotten, like a boat there only to ferry people across, asking nothing for itself. Once it has brought them to shore, its work is done.
Section Two answers the question the last section left: this great love, passed lamp to lamp, comes down at last to what one line? The answer: there is love in the human world. These words even a child can understand. The whole vastness of those thousand words was there to guard the plainness of this one line. "There is love in the human world" and "let people live as real humans" are two faces of one thing: when everyone lives the five out, this human world has love in it, of itself. The section also unties a question: institutions, mechanisms, laws seem cold and hard, so why does it all come down at the last to the word "love"? The floor of the economy is laid so that no one, for a mouthful of food, loses the ease to love one another. The rules of politics are laid so that the common instrument does not crush the warmth between person and person. The bounds of the law are laid to guard the order in which love can go on. Those laws are a hard suit of armor that love has had to put on. These words are half fact and half prayer: take them only as fact, and they run into blind optimism; take them only as prayer, and they run into empty imagining. At the end, it places this line in the reader's hands, like placing a seed in the palm of the hand.
Section Three is the last page of the whole book, four lines so short a child can read them aloud. The first line, the human world is full of love: seven volumes said everything about the darkness and hardship of this world, and what they have last to say is not how bad this world is. The mother's hand tucking in her child's blanket in the deep of the night, the stranger holding an umbrella over you in the rain, this love has never, for one moment, gone from the human world. To see the darkness and still see the love, that is true clear sight. The second line, the human world is full of hope: where there is love, there is hope, and this hope stands on the fact that there is love in the human world. Despair makes a person let go. Hope makes a person walk on. The third line matters most, in the human world, there is you: the greatest hope of this world was never in any savior. It is in the one who has read to here, in whose heart a share of warmth has been stirred. The last two words, that is enough: they do not demand too much, do not grasp for more. This is no passive making-do. It is the contentment and the settledness that come after seeing through, and also the final landing of that ground-tone, originally, not a single thing.
What this chapter sets firm is the last layer of the whole book: a great love does not last by one person or one book, but by each lamp lighting the next. It comes down to one line, there is love in the human world, and lands in four lines of blessing. This volume is called Hope, and that hope comes from just this love that fills the human world: so long as love remains, hope remains. All the thousand words of the whole book, traced to the very end, place their hope in the reader. The seven volumes of Justice Way close here, and the last words are still those four lines: The human world is full of love. The human world is full of hope. In the human world, there is you. And that is enough.
Chapter contents:
Section One. How a Great Love Remains in the Human World.
Section Two. The Great Love Comes Down to One Line: There Is Love in the Human World.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.