I was listening to the soundtrack from Where the Wild Things Are, more specifically the track called All is Love from Karen O and the Kids.
“L – O – V – E, It’s a mystery”
The lyric is repeated several times throughout the song and it got me thinking about how really fascinating the reality of ‘love’ is. From a purely rational standpoint, it doesn’t make all that much sense. Now, I know the naturalistic arguments for love. I just think they all sound to me like ditch efforts to explain something profoundly confusing. From my perspective, the practice and experience of love, outside of sexual pursuit, really is quite a mystery.
Why do two good friends care about one another, sometimes regardless of what the other one does, or does not do? Why do two brothers defend one another at the potential loss of their own lives? Why will a mother risk her other children to protect one?
To me, love really is mysterious.
I was just reading a short article on Gajitz.com about a Swiss team of scientists who developed a controlled colony of simple robots. After being introduced into a ‘natural’, evolution-like environment which involved communicating, feeding and mating, the robots eventually learned to lie to one another in order to starve their fellow robots and further their own progress.
All of it compounded to highlight the mesmerizing phenomenon that is human love. Impossible to neglect is the even wilder notion that an immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing God would love creatures of his own imagination that fail even his most basic standards. And a plan, devised by that being, for redemption which involves deep-seated self-sacrifice would then seem absolutely ludicrous.
Yet, this is what we believe and in this we place our faith. And for me, the basic phenomenon of love is an impossible evidence to ignore.
