Crime of Mars - The Maiden & Sweet Bee (8 of 12)

The Maiden & Sweet Bee

 

The Sixth Rhyme of Jean Ami

 

She spies good Sweet Bee on a stem; he gives his heart to her;

She tenders him her purity and strokes his golden fur

 

She smiles and goes a-buzzing,

And good Sweet Bee flits away:

 

For heavenly encounters are the theme most every day

 

She never sees Sweet Bee again; she never thinks of him,

As he is just a lover lost, a maiden's passing whim

 

But she grows wrinkled like a leaf

And lonely as a tree;

 

For God has written all she loves into His homily

 

Oh, broken is her antique heart,

So haggard, weak, and frayed

That she flees to the garden

Where she as a maiden played

 

And there "Sweet Bee" is buzzing by a great eternal stem;

For true, and everlasting love as touched and tethered them.^[1]

 

Thoughts of Camille Du Monde: Entry Eight

 

These lines speak to the heart of faith, as the First Love is the only love! And I do not refer to romantic love at all, but to that telling moment when a child sees his mother's face and for the first time beholds God’s grace in the eyes of another; or when he, in childhood, comes to recognize the bond between the sun’s bright beams and the warmth upon the flower he touches. He is, as this maiden to her Sweet Bee, bound forever to a face and to a touch. And every good that may come after will bear that countenance and share with him that touch. For no later good exceeds the first or enhances it in any way that matters. Love comes to us but once or not at all!

 

But love cannot come about unless it is caused to come about by love, and once caused to come about, it will cause more love. Therefore, love is perpetual and always the same, for no man is the source of the love he engenders, as he loves only because love is made available to him by a heart that is eternal, constant, and outside of him. It is for this reason that St. Paul elevated love above all other things.

 

"I am," God said �" Therefore, love is!

 

Moreover, love is never compromised, nor is it ever expended or subject to the scourge of measurable time. It is not diminished when a loved one dies, but lives within the one the loved one loved and all those who are loved by that loved one. Love is unalterable because God is unalterable; love is eternal because God is eternal. Thus, we love and are loved because God loved Adam, and Adam loved his children. Love is God’s primary act of grace;[2] it is the only torch He expects us to hand down to others; for in handing love down to others, we hand Him down forever.

 

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[1] Paris once shared a childhood memory about catching a butterfly. He said he was three years old at the time and could not recall exactly what he thought of the creature. But he knew it was a living thing and different from his parents and the cartoons he saw on television. “I held her for only a moment,” he mused, “but nearly a lifetime later, I still recall her beautiful face and think well of her.”  But even the recollection of a blissful moment could be disturbing to Paris, as it caused him to question whether love was about other people or about himself and how he experienced physical reality.

 

 

[2] Paris thought that our ability to reason latches onto love in the same way that our existential fear latches onto faith. He believed that many are too intelligent to comfortably enjoy a meaningless life, and that love seems to provide a reason for our being here. Even when our acts are brutish, our need for love resonates in the passion with which we pursue our ambitions. Though the poet admitted that this is not always so, nor does it resonate equally in all people, he was convinced that most of us resemble a loving God in that way: “We live for love,” he wrote. “We are love’s fools, even the worst of us.”