The First Call of Love

The improbable thing about instincts, in a self-conscious world, is that they have a life of their own. This is one of the basic conundrums of existence. Why was the world made this way, that while consciousness and self-knowledge want to grow, evolve and ascend, our instincts remain zoological? It's as if we have the whole herd of animal life tucked inside our individual human forms. How can we hope to change when we always want to eat the leaves of the highest trees or wallow in the deepest muddy swamp? What use are high-flown sentiments when the tongue will flash out and wrap itself round the nearest passing fly? Animals are surely one of the greatest pleasures in life, but the bestiary within is a different proposition.

I propose that at one time of year the instincts behave differently: they become anointed with light. This is portrayed in all those wonderful paintings which show the ox and ass - and maybe other animals - in attendance at the Nativity. The human heart melts and feelings pour into that place. Everything that was purely bodily is tinged for a while with the light of heaven. The heart melts - this is the clue to the animal kingdom overcoming itself in a self-conscious world, and the key to this basic conundrum of existence. The instincts are placed, by right, beside the crib. And, without a doubt, heaven shines down and loves the animals too.

This rarefied light is something we can only experience for a short time and then must come away again. We must go back to our fields and our houses and wrestle once more with the recalcitrance of the instincts. We can marvel again at the giraffes, the hippopotami and the long-tongued toads who live among us - perhaps within us. But something has changed: the human heart has become attuned to the sound of angel voices and nothing can completely change it back again. This divine-angelic being is within us as surely as the beasts of the field or the birds of the air. No amount of asceticism and mortification can turn us into saints without the presence, for a few short minutes in the longest night of the year, of that angelic child.

Now instinct loses its well-trodden path,

while sun and moon are flung in disarray.

I must rise up and journey to the compass

cross - the place where no directions start or end.

I'll look there for a nothing which is all,

a heart which starts to beat and holds all time.

I'll find there what my instincts understand:

the home, its firelight, the first call of love.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

Picture: Rembrandt, The Adoration of The Shepherds

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:

Author: Jay Landar

Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com

For other permissions please contact the author.