collection of ancient love poetry describing the desire of a bride to unite with her groom, who seems to draw away in order to stir up an even greater desire in her heart. The sensual nature of romantic married love is beautifully emphasized in this book of Scripture, as is the intense feeling of being madly enamored with someone. I think this is the aspect of love you typically channel in your music.
So what would a book like this have to say to a bunch of nuns who vow never to marry? Well, there is another way to interpret the Song of Songs. From a spiritual perspective, many writers have understood the beloved girl of the Song to represent the individual soul (or the church), and the bridegroom to represent God, manifest in Jesus Christ. The nuns, in other words, read the Song of Songs and recognize in its inspired words their own desire for union with God, expressed in marital imagery. The love of a nun for her Lord is not the same as a wife’s love for her husband because the union is a purely spiritual one, but it is no less beautiful in its intensity and in the commitment it requires: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, and ardor is fierce as the grave. Its flames are flames of fire, a raging flame” (Song 8:6). For the nuns, that love for Christ can indeed rage, and should be fanned into a great flame, but they also know that their love demands a lifelong commitment which will require immense sacrifices, the most obvious being the lack of a husband, children, and career.
But they do not write breakup songs to God, Taylor. They undoubtedly experience anger, confusion, and uncertainty about their relationship with the Lord, but grace allows them to trust in the love that initially incited them to abandon everything to follow Christ. God is always faithful to these nuns. He does not cheat them, or fail them in their time of need. Consoled by this knowledge, and painfully aware of their own sins and follies, the nuns simply persevere, and they in turn encourage their fellow sisters to remain faithful to their vows. I can almost guarantee that they would not want to trade places with you. It’s not that they despise the glamour and glitz that define your public persona (in fact, they probably pray that you not fall into the trap of thinking fame to be the ultimate goal of life); they just realize that they have found a beautiful way of expressing their love for God, and they are grateful to be part of a community created to support them in their vocation to become happy and holy. Such happiness, totally elusive and unimaginable to many people in the secular world, is part of the “hundredfold” which Jesus promised even in this life to those who gave up everything (see Mark 10:28–30).
So yeah, you should write a song about love from a nun’s perspective. Don’t worry, Taylor—I am not demanding that you drop your career immediately and join a convent . . . though there is precedent for it. A woman named Dolores Hart starred alongside Elvis Presley and other dashing actors before shocking Hollywood in the early 1960s by entering a Benedictine convent just as her career was taking off!27
Think too how wondrously liberating it would be if you never wrote another nasty venom-spewing breakup revenge song! If you want collaborators willing to craft that song with you, I would humbly suggest that you pay a visit first to the nuns, and then to my monastery in Dallas—Brother Francis and I do a wicked good cover of “Mean”!
26. Taylor Swift (b. 1989) is a very popular American singer-songwriter.
27. See Hart and DeNeut, Ear of the Heart. HBO also made a documentary about her entitled God is the Bigger Elvis.
Heraclitus28
Dear Heraclitus of Ephesus,
You probably don’t remember me, but a philosophy professor introduced me to you at the beginning of my junior year of college. The occasion was a semester-long fiesta called Ancient Philosophy, and you, at least for me, were the life of the party. Your wonder at the beauty of the cosmos was invigorating after the enlightened beatdown I received the previous semester at the hands of Hume, Kant, and Hegel. Truth be told, all of the pre-Socratic philosophers, not just you, fascinated me. I remember the thrilling sensation of grasping what Thales meant when he said that everything was water, and the joy of realizing how Empedocles could be right in asserting that love and strife govern every part of the cosmos and human life. There is an enduring freshness to the philosophy practiced by you and your Greek-speaking comrades that I found much more attractive than the analytic nitpicking I endured in other courses. I must confess, though, that a hopelessly romantic notion of the initial stages of philosophy clouds my judgment.
I hesitate to inform you that your book of musings, On Nature, survives only in fragmentary form. It was somehow lost in the flowing river of time, and we possess mere scraps of words and sentences of all the pre-Socratics, yourself included. The only reason we have even a glimpse of your actual text is because other philosophers and theologians quoted your words in their books. Their preservation of certain passages has ensured that your name is passed down along with these fascinating fragments. I suppose you will appreciate the mystique that attaches to thinkers like yourself who have been consigned to live only in the lines of others.
Anyone claiming that everything is fire is bound to gain a captive audience amongst pyro-happy male youth. I was particularly intrigued by your notion that an overall harmony is achieved by means of the coincidence or unity of opposites: night and day are, you argue, one and the same, as each gives way to the other. The idea itself of unity emerging from multiplicity is not unique to you. Many of your fellow pre-Socratics preached something similar, and even the distant philosophy of yin-yang in Taoism stresses the harmony of sun and moon, hot and cold, etc. Regarding all things as one brings a sense of wholeness to all of nature and human existence. Thus you could say, in the most famous line that has been transmitted to us, “No one steps into the same river twice.”29 We think the river is the same, and yet the water in that river is ever flowing, changing while always maintaining its identity.
You say the same thing about fire, noting that it changes as it burns, while always remaining the same fire. For you, fire is the fundamental element of our material world. Instead of thinking that the world was created, you maintain that it is an “ever-living fire” which expands and contracts as time moves forward. The burning sun is new every day, even though it always remains the same sun.30
In other fragments, you talk about fire possessing the ability to reason or think. After a certain amount of time spent scratching my head, I reached a moment of insight as a college lad. If I understood your teaching correctly (which is far from certain!), Heraclitus, fire is merely a sign or manifestation of the ultimate source of law, harmony, and unity in the universe, which you call the logos. For you, the logos is divine and objective; it causes all things to come into being, and every rational being has some share in this ultimate logos. That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone lives according to it—you have some scathing lines in which you claim that a majority of people live according to their own selfish logos, and even while awake act as they do when asleep, having tumbled out of the real world into a fantasy universe all their own.31 Those who are fully conscious, on the other hand, come to realize that there is but one cosmos common to us all, one reality in which we all participate.
It is about this logos that I want to talk to you. In the fragments attributed to you, the word is a cause, the reason behind all things, and the source of unity binding all opposites together. In reading your assertion that fire, the symbol of the logos in our world of experience, is wise and rational, the thought occurs to me: Have you ever pondered whether the logos knew you, or even loved you? Aware that you are by definition a lover of wisdom, namely, a philosopher, I thought you might be grateful to hear the speculations of a fellow Greek-speaking lover of the
