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The Quarrels of Love and Pride
Love and self-love are protagonist and antagonist in an unending drama to wrest control of the human heart.
When we love someone, by definition, they gain control over our emotions. One’s happiness and sadness become contingent on that person. By putting our pleasure and pain in the hands of another, we necessarily enter a position of subordination, of relative powerlessness. How incongruous is a singular, unbowed pride to this emotional servility.
How do Kings and Empresses love? Did each of them recoil when, lowering their head at that amorous altar, they found with each degree lower their proud neck drooped that the crown upon their head did not fit so snuggly as it once did? It was only gravity that held it on, keeping it fast against the scalp, and, with the descending of the head, that ever-present support met it only obliquely, sending the consecrated crown to tumble down to the floor.
It sheds insight into God’s need for adoration. Did God decree that He must be in every quarter worshipped upon finding that, if He was to bow his exalted head to love us, He must then require prostration in return, lest he ever find Himself the lower of the two in that grand coupling between each one of us and the Almighty?
