Summer love makes all the headlines and captures the imagination of song writers. But an all-season love is what people deeply desire.
Each season brings its own unique flavor of love, of course. Summer love is about energy and light. Autumn love is a matter of reaping the harvest that’s been sown. Winter love involves a hunkering-down and a tending of the fires. Spring love rekindles and renews.
But an all-season love delivers the faithfulness and constancy needed in each passing season. It gives witness to the supra-seasonal fidelity of the Lord, whose own love is mediated in and through the phases of our lives.
An all-season love knows that changes are not always linear and sequential. Sometimes they even seem to spiral in and through each other, according to some predestined double-helix design.
An all-season love speaks not only to passion and purpose, but also to desolation and even death itself. More than merely riding the swells of a stormy sea, or grasping white-knuckled in the face of life's vicissitudes, an all-season love provides the baseline and the underlying rhythm which provides stability amid the daily fluctuations on our journey home.
An all-season love perdures because it alone is eternal. It is the alternative to the using and the abandoning of worldly desires. An all-season love saves us from being chewed up and discarded like last year's mulched leaves.
An all all-season love sees itself not in terms of choosing, but in having first been chosen. It is defined not by its own thinking and acting, but by its primary stance of receiving and responding to the other.
While a seasonal love is by definition a passing fancy of some sort, an all-season love embraces the gift of existence itself. It breathes a quiet "Amen" to L. Guissani's insight, "I am because I am loved."
