How do I Love Thee?
Calla Lily Love “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) Whenever I come across this imperative in the gospels, my thoughts stray to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, How do I Love Thee? It begins, “How do I love thee? Let me count (list) the ways,” and then in the standard fourteen lines to which sonnets are restricted, her poem itemizes ten dimensions that characterize the speakers love for, not God, but a dear person. (I’ve attached her poem at the end of this meditation.) Question for me is, “When it comes to loving God with all my heart , soul , mind and strength , do I know what I actually mean? Could I list the ways? Does love really have two meanings, one that speaks of feeling and another focussed on doing. Is one aspect of love illustrated by “when I hear the knock on the door, I hope against hope that it will be you?” and another, “when I see anyone hungry, ...