If We Only Have Love
Let me just say it: Covid is not an attack on science; It’s an attack on love.
It’s the coldest thing that has ever happened, and it must be fought with everything we have left in our hearts.
And this—is what is so very difficult, precisely because our hearts are so blighted, almost lost to us. Who can even remember what it felt like to function and respond as human beings were designed to?
I sat down in my armchair tonight, my cat Lewis at my side, drew a deep breath, and watched yet another video. It was three brave Canadians, speaking with quivering voices, about how speaking up against the imminent mass vaccination of children—will kill many of them.
I stayed with it, watched their faces, took in the details, so familiar now, so impossible to fathom: How by doing their jobs, an MP, a vaccinologist, a doctor—they were immediately subject to a bombardment of vicious slander, harassment, fake social media accounts, threats, careers terminated, in one case, parents medical records posted online. Vaccine-fascism—the fascism that would eclipse all others, decades after we assumed that ugly “far-right” beast had been defeated. But this fascism has won over the globalist liberal left the world over— even a nation we assumed to be so benign and harmless as Canada—now foaming at the mouth to destroy any and all who wish to protect their children from death by untested mRNA injections they do not need.
We’ve all seen so many of these testimonies and somehow we “process” them, we send them around, we go to sleep and continue the next day, all of us waiting and praying to wake up from what surely must be a bad dream we’re all having. This can’t be real.
This particular video, these Canadians, for some reason, caused me to break down and cry. They weren’t classically “brave” they were something even more rare. Terrified, yet finding their voices.
These heroes are everywhere now. The risk of not speaking out is greater than the risk of speaking out. These people know full well their careers are over, but they do do it anyway. There is great beauty and hope in every last one of these voices:
So I finally cried. A desperate weeping that was long held back by my fighting brain.
I thought about all the people I miss, love, can’t call— because I am too afraid they will tell me they had the shots. It’s not political. It’s not about being right. It’s about an engulfing grief, that you weren’t able to stop this, even in people you thought you knew, or maybe, were once married to. Or grew up with.
Mark said: “We’re going to have to prepare for enormous grief.”
I said: “I can’t. I have reached my limit.”
What that meant was I had stopped feeling. I’d become fossilized. I could still send around warning materials but I couldn’t feel the grief.
Music.
Music is the bridge back to the heart.
It’s always the same song, the one song I have always loved, played in my childhood home since before I could talk, played at my wedding, and at my mother’s funeral— a song that seems to me to be the greatest song ever written. It’s not a love song, as such, it’s a song about love as the conquerer of all pain, all evil, all sadness. IF we ONLY had love (English.) “Quand—” (when, in French) “On a Que Lamour” (we had nothing but love.)
I sat and listened to every version in English before selecting an obscure one. I’m posting the original song by Jacques Brel, the lyrics in French, the lyrics in English, and the version I chose so you can hear it in English.
It’s what came to me as the answer and the antidote—better to say, the triumph, over the horror they have inflicted on us, which is an attempt to eliminate love from the human experience. So Brel was right. If we only have love—Nous aurons dans nos mains…amis, le monde entier.
(‘We will have in our hands, friends, the entire world.’)
How grateful I am that my mother, Ulla, played Brel in our home from when I was so small, the song is in my blood forever, and it saves me, on nights like this; I want it to save you too.
French lyrics:
Quand on a que l'amour
À s'offrir en partage
Au jour du grand voyage
Qu'est notre grand amour
Quand on a que l'amour
Mon amour toi et moi
Pour qu'éclate de joie
Chaque heure et chaque jour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour vivre nos promesses
Sans nulle autre richesse
Que d'y croire toujours
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour meubler de merveilles
Et couvrir de soleil
La laideur des faubourgs
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour unique raison
Pour unique chanson
Et unique secours
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour habiller matin
Pauvres et malandrins
De manteaux de velours
Quand on a que l'amour
À offrir en prière
Pour les maux de la terre
En simple troubadour
Quand on a que l'amour
À offrir à ceux-là
Dont l'unique combat
Et de chercher le jour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour tracer un chemin
Et forcer le destin
À chaque carrefour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour parler aux canons
Et rien qu'une chanson
Pour convaincre un tambour
Alors sans avoir rien
Que la force d'aimer
Nous aurons dans nos mains
Amis, le monde entier
(I object to parts of the English translation so here’s my quick translation:)
When we only have love
To share
On the day of the big voyage
That is our great love
When we only have love
My love you and me
So that we can burst with joy
Every hour and every day
When we only have love
To live out our promises
With no other wealth
Than to always believe in it
When we only have love
To furnish with wonders
And cover with the sun
The ugliness of the suburbs
When we only have love
The only reason
The only song
The only help
When we only have love
To dress in the morning
Dirt poor rascals
in Velvet coats
When we only have love
To offer in prayer
For the evils of the earth
As a simple troubadour
When we only have love
To offer to those
Whose only fight
Is to seek the day
When we have that love
To make a path
To forge destiny
At every crossroads
When we have that love
To talk to the guns
And nothing but a song
To convince* a drum
[* French speaking friends, need help with this: “convaincre un tambour?”]
Without having anything at all
Except the strength to love
We will have in our hands Friends,
the entire world
As for English versions, I offer two, one obscure, one famous:
“These people know full well their careers are over, but they do it anyway.” And possibly worse than losing their careers; seeing old bonds of family and friendship reduced to antipathy. For this true courage they are called “selfish”, “egotistical”, etc. That this calibre of attack finds fertile soil in the general population is an unequivocal sign of mass hysteria magicked to fever pitch by people who know what they do, but lack the wisdom and compassion to really KNOW what they do. Should they ‘succeed’, what world do they imagine their children will inherit?
They cannot succeed. Love and Life are the stronger forces. This is a global object lesson in hubris, loveless ambition, the bitterness of cowardly compliance and valuing mere social status above all other things. It is Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice writ large, become a conflagration of the vanities.
I am shocked, too often to count, by how violently invested people are in hateful fear, in wilful ignorance. Finding my way to a loving response is extremely difficult, especially because there’s very little one can do with it but wait. And watch on in (seemingly) impotent horror. The hysterical mob has to exhaust itself, spend its fury, run its course. I suppose it was always going to go this way; how else can humanity learn what it needs to learn? And yet this mob has been deliberately coaxed into being: a crime against humanity. Or is it a crime of humanity against itself?
Free will is sacred. Knowing this is one part of what can be the sorrow of love. And even though free will has been manipulated and deceived by those few who seek to impose theirs over everyone else’s – at the expense of the innocent! – even though righteous anger feels so strongly like the right response, when we love we emanate love, and that is vital.
For whatever reason, it dawned on me sometime during my early thirties that love must be unconditional to be love. Something about that realisation put me on a particularly moral path that has, it seems, triggered all manner of personal object lessons as fate relentlessly, lovingly, disavowed me of my delusions of grandeur, my vanities, insecurities, and much else besides. It is a continuing process. One truth that has been almost crow-barred into me is that love has no object. “I love you” is not, strictly speaking, a logically tenable utterance. “I am love”, though grand, is closer, or perhaps simply, “I love”. Love opens loving connections between self and others that give rise to the “I love you” feeling, which is so wonderful to speak.
Love arises naturally when we clear ourselves of our emotional-psychological muck. If we think of the soul as a tuning fork, it cannot sing unless it is naked, uncluttered, clean. When it sings, it just sings. Its song has no object; it is an emanation, the natural state of a truly healthy soul. That state is the way out of this horror, because this horror is the natural consequence of turning away from love, away from God, and pursuing vanities, greeds, selfish appetites. Every one of us can dedicate ourselves humbly to this extraordinary undoing towards love. It is exactly as painful as our resistance to its lessons is fierce.
As Pema Chodron put it: “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”