VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 2

VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 2

The Great Love Comes Down to One Line: There Is Love in the Human World

The last section made plain how a great love remains in the human world, passed lamp to lamp, never breaking. This section carries it one step further, and asks: this great love, run all the way down, comes to what? It comes to one line, the plainest line there is. There is love in the human world. Everything this book laid, every institution, every intent, every stroke of reasoning, was laid to guard this one line, to keep it true. That the human world has love in it, that a person, born into this world, meets in it not only cold and cruelty but warmth, kindness, a hand held out, this is the whole of what the great love comes down to, and the whole of what the book was for.

See first why the grand thing comes down to so plain a line. Great love is a large word, and could seem to point at something far off, something lofty, something few could reach. Run it down to the ground and it comes to something a child could say and everyone has felt: there is love in the human world. It is in a mother waking at her child's cry. It is in a neighbor's bowl of hot soup. It is in a stranger steadying an old man at the curb. It is in a hand reaching down to one who has fallen. These plainest, smallest warmths, going on everywhere, every day, unremarked, are the great love, in the flesh. The great love is not somewhere above the clouds. It is here, in these small warm things, and the sum of all of them, the plain fact that runs under all of them, is this one line: there is love in the human world. That is what the great love comes down to. Nothing loftier, and nothing less.

And this one plain line is what every institution in the book was laid to guard. Why lay a floor of living, so none go hungry? So that hunger would not drive out the love, would not force a person to harm another for a mouthful and so cool the warmth between them. To guard the line: there is love in the human world. Why grow the heart, cure the tormenting? So that people would meet in kindness and not cruelty, so the love between them would not be worn away. To guard the same line. Why turn the instrument to service, light the intent of the law, put the tool back in its place, keep the paradise? Every one of them, run down to the root, was to guard this: that the human world would keep its love, that a person born into it would find warmth there, that the love would not be crushed out by hunger, cruelty, force, the cold letter, the tool on the person's place, the paradise spent. All the grand machinery of the book was built around this one small line, to guard it, to keep it true. Take the line away and the machinery stands for nothing. Hold it, and every part of the machinery shows its purpose: to keep love in the human world.

This is why the line, plain as it is, is the deepest thing the book has to say. A person can bear much if the human world has love in it. Hunger is bearable if a hand reaches out. Hardship is bearable among people who care. Even death is bearable, held in love. But a human world with the love gone out is unbearable, whatever else it has: full granaries and cold hearts, high towers and no hand held out, every comfort and no warmth, that is the true hell, the pit the earlier chapter named. So the one thing that must be guarded, above all the rest, is this: that the human world keeps its love. Guard that, and a person, however hard his lot, is not without hope, for he is not without love. Lose that, and no abundance, no order, no cleverness can make the human world a place worth living in. There is love in the human world: this is the line on which everything turns, the line the whole book was written to keep true.

And this line is one a person can prove for himself, and must, for it to mean anything. It is not a claim to be taken on the book's word. It is a thing each person finds, or fails to find, in his own living. Look, and you will see it: the small warmths going on all around, the love that is in fact here, in the human world, now, this moment, in a thousand small unremarked things. To see them is to know the line is true, not because a book said so, but because you have seen the love with your own eyes, felt it with your own heart. And having seen it, you are asked to add to it, to be one more of the small warm things, one more hand held out, so that the line stays true for the next person, who will look, and find love in the human world, partly because you put it there. The line is guarded not only by institutions but by each person who lives it, each who chooses, in his own small corner, to be the love he wants the human world to have. So the great love comes down to this one line, and this one line comes down, at last, to you: there is love in the human world, and you are asked to be some of it.

So the whole great love of the book gathers into one plain line, and the whole book's labor into the guarding of it. There is love in the human world. Keep it true. That is the last teaching, before the last word. And now only the last word remains, the final page, the last thing this great love, and this whole book, has to say. The next section is that page.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.