“No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people.” That’s the way Maria Popova begins a particularly poetic section of her writing, a section that speaks a profound and enlightened wisdom against the bigoted intolerance of the Far Right’s regressive social politics. Love is a power that can move heaven and earth, but religious and social fundamentalism fears that power and locks people’s bodies and souls inside narrow expressions of love, stifling the heart-song love longs to sing through us, leaving us dull to its universal music, leaving us longing for the melody we somehow sense exists, the harmony that can make us whole. And this is the great tragedy: love wants to set us free but we’d rather crucify it—and those who celebrate it and those who seek it—rather than allow love to disturb and transform our lives and liberate our bodies and souls.
This is the great irony, of Christianity, for example: for all its talk of love, it keeps crucifying those who, like Jesus, want to love without the artificial limits religion places on the many kinds of love we feel. . . .