i carry your heart with me

Today I sat for my first quiz in three and a half years. What an odd feeling. Quizzes are such a distinctly American tradition (I managed to escape last semester because I only took seminars, but I'm taking more classes this term.) They take their testing very seriously in this country. Did you know that a "quest" is that which is between a quiz and a test? We certainly took no quizzes, quests or tests at Oxford. Only exams. Big exams. Also, the Spelling Bee is a national sport which many middle schoolers (and their parents) earnestly devote themselves to, in search of fame and spelling glory. All this brings to mind another country which also takes its testing very, very seriously. But in any case, I digress. I mentioned the quiz only because I felt so accomplished at having actually taken one, that after class I stopped by the video store and rented In Her Shoes. (I haven't rented anything since Christmas.)

I rather enjoyed the movie. It's one of those rare dramedies that's mainly about family instead of romance. The core relationship between two sisters, while histrionic at times, was mostly quite moving. In the DVD extras, the scriptwriter mentioned that what she loved about the book was something that isn't just true for sibling relationships or family relationships, but true for every relationship. And that is that the people whom you love best, who know you best, are the ones who can hurt you the most. This is the risk of loving.


It was C. S. Lewis who said: Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

It always amazes me how God chose to love us, how he willingly allowed himself to be vulnerable, firstly in the very act of creation and then later on the cross. For the very relationship of love is premised upon the existence of free choice, without that it would simply be compulsion. So we can choose to love God, but clearly we can also choose to reject him.


This movie will do for the poetry of e. e. cummings, what Four Weddings and A Funeral did for the poetry of W. H. Auden (Stop all the clocks...)

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


I think about how the most beautiful celebrations of love always carry hints of the transcendental.

I think about how the best aspects of earthly love always echo the eternal.

As Pope Benedict writes so utterly movingly in his first encyclical on Love: It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself. [6]

Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34). [7]


i carry your heart with me

i carry it in my heart