Love is the measure
Garvey, John
Ivan had had a personal devotion to Nuestra Segora de El Cisne, the patroness of Loja, Ecuador. He was buried the next day from Saint Michael's Church, where there is a special shrine to her. Her...
...But turn to the possibility many of the president's friends fear: that he did have some sort of sexual relationship with Lewinsky and has lied about it...
...If the allegations are even partly true, we will once again engage the messy questions involving the relationship between a politician's sexual life and his public character, the press's role in reporting on such matters, and the obligations of politicians to be honest about what they do, even in private...
...What endures is the senselessness of the murder and the longing for Ivan to rouse them all at 3 A.M...
...Inquiries to: ARIL, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY 10805 email: aril@ecunet.org tel: 914-235-1439 web: www.aril.org Applications deadline: March 1 st...
...Commonweal 9 February 13, 1998...
...The widow has four small orphans to cherish but only her husband's ashes and broken dreams to console her...
...The love of a parent for a child is not a choice...
...Well, sex...
...And it is on the basis of these acts of love that we will be judged, and, according to Matthew 25, this incarnate love is the only criterion for our judgment...
...If so, why...
...The righteous and unrighteous alike ask, "When did we see you hungry, thirsty, a stranger, sick, in prison...
...I remember a lame defense of clerical celibacy that went something like this: The married man or woman loves one person, and the celibate is freed to love all persons equally.'There are good arguments for celibacy (at least for monks and nuns, if not for parish priests) but this is not one of them...
...Is that our business...
...Western Wind" shows us a specific, erotic yearning...
...Now the new year is very old...
...In h'uth, most of the press does not love to report on this stuff, a point made by Clinton's THE ASSOCIATION FOR RELIGION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE A'""R, invites applications for the Research Colloquium to be held at Columbia University July 6 - July 31, 1998 Fellows will work on a research project of their own choice in the context of a supportive, critically engaged, and diverse community...
...The first person he encountered was a boy of about eight, who was armed, and as the veteran tried to tell the story, he wept: He killed the child...
...Her visage graces his laminated funeral card on one side, Ivan's serious, now eternally young face on the other...
...Given all the forces at work to bring him down, wouldn't new sexual adventures be dangerously reckless...
...Even abused children understand at some level that their parents should love them, and want to love the abusive parent...
...There is here something close to an absolute: The person to whom evil has been done knows that the world should not be this way, that things are meant to be different, that real love never behaves like this....Love is in this sense like gravity, and where it should be and is not there is the sense of something against the grain, something unnatural...
...To answer these questions, of course, we'll need to know more than the president has told us...
...Any true act of compassion--whether done for consciously Christian reasons or not, and for that matter whether done by a Christian or not--is a work in which the love of God is incarnate...
...What fascinates me about both poems is that although they are separated by four hundred years, they are metrically similar...
...If he's a good president and the affairs are consensual, what difference does it make...
...This was written by the always prolific Anonymous, probably during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century...
...I've heard it said, and not just by Clinton supporters: Who cares with whom the president sleeps...
...A person who has not loved a particular person is not capable of loving anyone, much less many people...
...Most of the listeners expected him to speak of his own injuries...
...Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again...
...And we will be judged for what we have failed to do for the Lord if we fail to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those who are in prison...
...The importance of these poems for me is not only literary, but has to do with how we think of love--the particular love we have for the one we want to take into our arms, which has to do with larger loves...
...Although love in practice can be the most complicated thing in the world, it is not hard for us to understand at one level...
...These things are either true or they're not...
...The reporter, Diana Nyad, was part of a cycling tour of Vietnam...
...I heard a report on National Public Radio recently that told of a remarkable example of compassion...
...instead, he told of entering a village with orders to kill the first person he met who coUld spread the alarm about the advancing American troops...
...Even if your predisposition is not to care or want to know about a politician's sex life, hadn't Clinton implicitly promised Americans that he would spare us from further spectacles...
...What about...
...They either have innocent explanations or they don't...
...W any parents have had to confront the question I had from my son: What did President Clinton do wrong...
...The bitterness that leads to further abuse, as in the case of the abused child who grows into an abusive parent, is a reaction to a profound betrayal, a betrayal of something primordial...
...And why in the world does the press love to report on this stuff...
...The answer would be refreshingly simple: The president did nothing wrong...
...the tour included a number of veterans who had been wounded in Vietnam...
...u[:E'J" CK|MT@MDIONNE' Jr.& KI~|MSHY ~ ~~~ Breaking the news or making the news...
...Love doesn't exist "in general...
...One of the children, seeing his tears, began to weep too, and went over to him and put her arms around him...
...One is about a specific and erotic longing, the other about something equally specific, but it moves from the specific to the abstract in a fierce and wonderful way that reminds me of Blake, as much of Patchen's work does...
...both are also about love (which, Yeats said, is the only thing other than death that adults can take seriously), and have an immediate power...
...We will grapple with these not as abstract issues, but as concrete questions about Bill Clinton...
...What is important is that the people being rewarded, as well as those who are being punished, do not know when they have done, or failed to do, something for the Lord...
...Whether we talk about the love of husband for wife or parent for child, there is something helpless about love, something that takes us out of ourselves whether we like it or not...
...Did he spend much time with her...
...abide in my love....This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you'(John 15: 9, 12...
...The next: Wide, wide, in the rose's side Sleeps a child without sin, And any man who loves in this world Stands here on guard over him...
...Clinton would have no need to perjure himself or encourage her to lie...
...The potentially lethal scandal in which the president finds himself will force everyone to figure out his or her own answer...
...For the rest of us--who never rode with Ivan--there is a yearning for the young preacher's assurance: for an understanding of forgiveness, and some release from outrage...
...LOVE IS THE MEASURE . ~ From the particular to the universal ~-~" irst, two poems---one from the beginning of (more or less) modern English, the other contemporary...
...During a meeting with Vietnamese schoolchildren, one of the tour members who had suffered terrible injuries was asked about his worst memory of the war...
...If Clinton had no sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, the controversy melts away...
...Did he leave her phone messages...
...Did he send her gifts...
...Infatuation, often the beginning of erotic love, can be overwhelming and distressing, inconvenient...
...Life continues...
...This was written by the American poet Kenneth Patchen in 1957...
...In John's account of the Last Supper, Commonweal 8 February 13, 1998 Jesus tells his disciples, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you...
...Room, board, and library privileges at Columbia, Union or Jewish Theological Seminaries are provided...
...If the charges are false, all he would need to do is deal with the specific details that have emerged: How well did he know Lewinsky...
...Western wind, when will thou blow, The small rain down can rain...
...Is that a hanging offense...
...it is a force that impinges itself on your life...
...And Matthew 25 makes it clear that this love must take concrete form: Whatever we do for "the least of these my brethren" is done for the Lord...
...Put aside for a moment what could really get the president into legal trouble--not the relationship itself, but that he may have lied about it under oath...
...Wide, Wide, in the Rose's Side" shows us a child, and from the child we go to all love, to anyone who loves--but it begins with one bit of flesh, bone, and beating heart...
...It is the sort of card one sees hanging from the rearview mirrors in some Gypsy cabs: a prayer in plastic, made to endure and to shield from tears...
...That love need not be erotic, but it has to be for a particular person...
...I have no idea if she was a Buddhist, a Christian, or an atheist, but the compassionate love of God was certainly present in that moment, and in the specific gesture of taking the weeping man in her arms...
...And that, worse still, he or his agents encouraged Lewinsky to lie...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 3
