A love to give you chills

Neo-neocon is a really splendid writer, and a most astute and sensitive sort of thinker. She has a remarkable post up – one that gave me goosebumps when I read it, because it is so wise, and true, and such a testament to the supernatural power of love.

She writes of a musician and conductor named Clive Wearing, who – after suffering a bout of encephalitis – has lost all of his long-term memory.

From the beginning of his illness Clive always could remember certain elements about himself and his life, even though he had no memories of a single actual event in a life filled with honors and accomplishments as well as personal fulfillment. He remembered, for example, that he’d been a musician and conductor. He remembered he was married and who his wife was; he remembered his children from a previous marriage (although not their names). That was pretty much it, however.

What is the thread that holds all three things together? I submit that it is love.
…
Deborah had actually divorced Clive some nine years after his illness and moved to America to get away, perhaps even to marry and have children. But, inexorably drawn back by the power of love, she returned and remarried him. Apparently Clive retained enough of his “Cliveness” to keep her from beginning a new life with anyone else.

As she says,

I realised that we are not just brain and processes. Clive had lost all that and yet he was still Clive. Even when we didn’t see one another, when we were six months apart and only spoke on the telephone, nothing had changed. Even when he was at his worst, most acute state, he still had that huge overwhelming love … for me. That was what survived when everything else was taken away.

Clive himself seems to agree:

Clive often says: “We aren’t two, darling, we are one.” Recently, someone asked him to state his complete name. “Clive David Deborah Wearing,” he answered. “Strange name. Who knows why my parents called me that.”

Read the whole thing and marvel in the miracle of love. And think about how for the world, “marriage” has become less a sacrament and more of a social contract. And yet “the two shall become one flesh…”

Sometimes people ask me why the Catholic church allows annullment – it all seems like a “pay as you exit” scheme to them. But there is a supernatural element, completely spiritual, that should exist within marriage, and if it is not being admitted into the marriage (or not being entered into by the couple) well, perhaps then the marriage itself never did “exist,” except on paper.

Somethings truly are in the stars.

Sigmund has more thoughts, and do read the thougthful comments at Neo-neocon’s place!