The mark of a truly great life is a great love.
So, the romances are right, after all? What a relief to a soul like mine, worn out from the workaday world, from the waning of life's romance in the wake of bills, car repairs: I suppose I fit the remark of CS Lewis via Digory in The Magician's Nephew, "All the adults cared about was the plumbing." Now, Digory, to be fair, someone's got to take care of the plumbing--but, yes, total focus on it can and does sometimes rob life of the beautiful colors and smells and sights and touch of the magical world seen best by children and saints like Francesco of Assisi. Over the years, because of my growing cynicism I'd got to the point where I'd buy cheap romance novels to give as prank gifts: the best one I found, by the way, as a going-away gift, was Wicked Wyoming Nights.
However, I am gifted by God with children brought up in Wonderful Wyoming Days, for the most part. They, like many in their generation, fell in love as young hearts with the magic of Tolkien's sub-creation and the ready parallels to this they found in the panorama of rivers flanked by enormous, red canyon walls and sage brush reaching out a hundred miles towards snow-capped sentinels saluting an unbroken, blue sky sometimes populated with cloud castles, ever-changing decor in the powerful, unmediated light of the high desert. They saw, and loved, the possibility for discovery, for adventure, the sheer grandeur and mystery of the world around them, down to whatever was around the corner from our house; they waited for the first snow to fall and ran out in it; they waited for our annual Christmas Eve feast as if it were a heavenly banquet, and for the 4th of July in Lander as if it were the trumpets sounding the Return of the King. They were naturally drawn to beauty, and they loved it in its many forms. They loved in the most basic way; they desired unity and unending discovery of something beyond themselves. As they grew, as children do, they struggled in puberty with the many changes, the least of which is the physical change into an adult body; the major, most profound change was in the eyes of the soul, a soul that learns and develops through poetic images, images of beauty, most profoundly---and this change is the most painful.
I am not sure, quite, what happens, but it is as if the rose-colored glasses are washed away by the hormone-shifting, and the romance, the magic, the open door in every tree leading to the Hundred Acre Wood all disappear and are often replaced by the sight and desire for a human, physical love. In one sense, this is a step up to the first rung of the Ladder of Love described in Plato's Symposium. The Ladder starts, as Socrates explains it, with the love of a particular beautiful body; then, as all beautiful bodies share in 'beauty' as a quality, the lover begins to realize his love for this universal quality of beauty; next, as St. Ignatius Loyola realized when he saw the decaying corpse of the queen he'd idealized for her beauty, the lover begins to understand that the soul-qualities that are the formation, a cause of the physical, the moral and spiritual beauties of the soul, are higher 'participations in' or manifestations of beauty; then, beautiful laws and institutions created by beautiful souls are higher because more universal; then, the next, higher rung is the beauty of knowledge (philosophy) because for Plato this is the soul of beautiful laws and institutions; finally, philosophy, or the love of wisdom, leads directly to a sight of that unmediated light, the Form of Beauty itself, that for the sake of which all else beautiful is, the source of all beauty.
Therefore, considering love as a desire for Beauty, smaller and greater loves are defined by their end-object; is it true that what we love, what we see as Beautiful defines us, forms us, reveals us? As my children grew up, like Digory did, I watched them struggle with the loss of that great vision, those special glasses through which they caught a glimpse of Beauty, a Beauty above their understanding and beyond them. They had to begin, in a sense, at the bottom, with the hormones raging and the new desires for particular beautiful bodies distracting them. Yet, though there was and is some sadness and loss in it, they must climb the ladder which is the journey of the embodied soul and deal with the romances of teenager, the lessons and disappointments, the joys and the temptations. The world tells them, in most 'romances' (not necessarily on a certain spectrum with Wicked Wyoming Nights) that they should stop here, on the first couple of rungs, that a great personal romance is the top of the Ladder, that another person can encompass all the rungs of the Ladder: the body, the soul, the institution (as a couple, a family), as knowledge, as Beauty itself. In a sense, there is truth to this: a human person has a certain participation in Beauty itself because he or she is made in the image of God, of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness personified. Yet, yet, there is a problem with this. Anyone who has stayed married long enough knows that another human person cannot, does not, fully embody Beauty, because Beauty is, as Socrates states, more universal and cannot be encompassed by any particular creature. Beauty, for Socrates, is a source, a cause, a telos (that for the sake of which). It informs all below it, it is the source of all that participates in it; without sight of this source, or desire for it, one can easily mistake the rung for the whole ladder, including what is beyond it, and in doing so, miss that for which our hearts are truly restless, as St. Augustine teaches. Not only this, but there are counterfeits of Beauty parallel to every rung: by mistaking or choosing the counterfeit instead of the real thing, we begin to climb down a parallel, but descending ladder: a beautiful particular thing can be simply a satisfaction of lust, and there are never enough of them; the satisfaction found in many particular things leads us to amass them and try to possess them; the very nobility of our own soul and the souls around us can be used to serve our own lusts; institutions and communities are desired not for the beauty in them, but for what they can give our ego and our will; philosophy becomes sophistry in service of our own status, and Beauty becomes nothing more than the Self. In view of these dangers, it is by our very real and our poetic experiences of the failures of particular creatures, jobs, institutions, communities, things, specializations, accomplishments to satisfy that longing, that searching so obvious to the child's soul before beginning the arduous climb up the Ladder, that we must make choices about the object of our love, our deepest longings, that desire which defines us and determines who we will become.
Encountering the lives of others, like poetic images, is one way we learn what to choose: recently, I've 'met' three people who all bear the mark of a 'great' or 'enormously powerful' desire. Two of them were a married couple, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator couple executed, in horrific poetic justice of a sort, on Christmas Day in 1989. Born in real poverty, his childhood romance with life marred and warped perhaps in part by a drunken, cheat of a father, Nicolae left home at ten years old and eventually found community in the Communist Party. "Why should those pigs have great houses while everyone else starves?" he was once heard to ask by a fellow inmate when in prison for Communist activities in pre-Communist Romania; the only particular person he seemed to love as a young man was his wife, Elena, who seemed over time to encompass everything in his life; in turn, she seemed to love power and control most of all: He and she and power seemed to form a kind of counterfeit Ladder. There is a news film of Elena seated next to Chairman Mao's wife on that fateful trip to China in 1971, which seems like a poisoned watershed moment in their lives, and the subsequent life of their nation. Next to the powerful wife of Mao, perhaps comparing herself to the other woman who seemed farther along the ladder to ultimate satisfaction, Elena's dark eyes stare, the pupils spreading across the irises like ink spilling, the soul spilling out in desire to grasp the world. She took power for herself after she saw what the Maos had accomplished in terms of control, and became the force in Romania behind the 'management of the masses.' Her husband seems more fearful and human than she does; her desire, her 'love' seems more 'pure' in a sense. They become unabashed egoists, the love of power an undisguised love of themselves, and of course, like so many who appear 'to love' the masses, or the workers, or humanity, traitors to their own espoused philosophy. They are eidelon, or false images; they are nothing, but it is the nothingness of a black hole, gaping ever wider, sucking the lives of others to maintain itself, sucking Beauty out of the world for everyone around. Even when counterfeit, aimed at the Self, human love in its most pure state has a greatness, a power to it, albeit the nuclear power only to destroy that very self. Thus, as the adult (Professor) Digory says later: it is all in Plato...the unjust, no matter how pure or 'great' their desires, in the end have no power, because they destroy themselves; they cannot fulfill the end for which they seek, because the self is not the source of life, or beauty, or power, and the real telos and therefore happiness for the human soul is found in giving oneself to Another, as love can only survive and grow when poured out in the service of others. The self or another egoist as source leads to an ever-gaping hole, a perfect negative image to the real source of life and love, which is at the top of the Ladder, the real Ladder.
The third person I have met recently is a young man, Carlos Acutis; born in 1991, he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2006 at fifteen years old from a rare, fast-moving form of leukemia. Already with a sizable following in his own country, he was declared "Venerable" by the Catholic Church in 2018. His life, like Elena Ceaușescu's, is marked by a great and pure desire. In his childhood, he somehow encountered Christ, most profoundly in the Eucharist at his First Communion just at the age of reason. He fell in love with a particular body, in a sense, but this Body was also Beauty Himself; this encounter was the nexus, the meeting place of the first, lowest rung of the Ladder and what is beyond it: in his child's soul, there seemed to be no doubt, perhaps because he still had that vision of the child, and it came together with Christ in a tangible, particular way, a way that Carlos could grasp, a grasp of all the levels of the Ladder at once. His actions, his life, his decisions were all guided by, sourced in, that great meeting of universal and particular Beauty that is the God-Man in the Eucharist. When you see films of Carlos, or photographs, he has a similar focused look to Elena, a deep and pure desire; the gestures and body stances may all seem similar: an open-armed stance toward the world, a certain authority. However, Elena is a dark, negative image of Carlos: something about Carlos is truly receptive of Another, of a Love which truly serves; Carlos seems to become part of any scene he is in, truly with anyone with whom he is photographed. His desire spills outward, like a spring, as if there is a great aquifer in his heart that by nature flows outward; Elena's desire draws everything inward to her, like a predator who looks intensely to see what it can consume next. Carlos draws in only to point to something, Someone, beyond himself, a Source beyond, above, up the Ladder. In his short life, Carlos seemed to give to the world, not take from it. He seemed to be aware of the Ladder we must all climb, for he practiced great self-control around desires, knew that the nature of Beauty, of Love, is to serve and to spend itself for others rather than the self, and spent his energies and talents drawing attention to the Eucharist, to Christ, to Beauty, which was his greatest desire, his goal, his telos. On his coffin is an engraving of the Eucharist in a monstrance, surrounded by the words, "La mia autostrada per il cielo," which in true teenage fashion, means "My highway to heaven." On this highway, or ladder, in his great love of the Beauty beyond his life, he became beautiful: and he is marked also by greatness, a greatness that, like that of his mentor St. Francis of Assisi (Carlos is buried there), will grow. True greatness, then, is the soul's participation in the Greatness, the Humble Love, of God.
Carlos particularly shows, as well, that indeed we receive this great love, we do not manufacture it, because this great love implanted itself in him as a little boy, a boy in a more nominally Catholic family. He did not come from great trauma or suffering; he was a happy, normal child, not particularly deserving of any such great gift; thus he shows us that we are simply not the source of this Love, this Person. It is a gift. Carlos was given a tremendous gift of faith and sight in childhood that informed and weathered the storms of early adolescence, and he seems to have ascended the Ladder at lightning speed, like a bottle rocket. The key is that he received this great love, responded to it with generosity, caught sight of Beauty Itself, and allowed it to imbue all the descending participations in Beauty, and that Beauty through him poured out to his community, the Church, particular souls, and all around him. Two months before his death, before they knew he had any issues at all (his leukemia was sudden and fast-moving), he is filmed saying, "My destiny is to die" and he smiles and claps his hands, and looks away with a certain intensity of peace. Elena, on the other hand, never accepted death or recognized it as a possibility, it seems, even as she shouts for them to not to hurt her hands as she is led out for execution. But somehow a fifteen-year-old Italian teenager knew that even death becomes beautiful in the life of a truly great person marked by a great love, the greatest of all loves: Romance returns, and we become childlike again, but in love with the Real Thing, not stopping at the things and fellow-creatures participating in it. In receiving this love, often shown us through suffering the losses that teach us to look beyond for Beauty, we go beyond human childhood and reach spiritual childhood, and in doing so, we transcend ourselves. We learn, finally, only to love creatures in relation to and because of, for the sake of, Christ, Beauty and Wisdom personified. And this is justice, and power, and order. This is greatness.
And so this young man who could be my son has become my elder brother, a model, a poetic image of what it means to be born again, to become again as a child and so to enter the Kingdom of God.
