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Time Enough for Love
When I was a young man I worked in a carpentry shop in Vancouver, British Columbia with my friend, Brad. Although we were good workers we spent most of our time joking and laughing with each other and when work was over we would go to the bar for a few beer and some more laughs.
In the shop one January day our light banter was interrupted by a news item on the radio. A small airplane carrying a father and his teenage daughter had crashed in the snowy mountains that stretch along the coast of British Columbia. The rescue plane could not reach them before darkness fell so the two were left stranded in sub zero weather for the night. At some point the father must have realised that his daughter would not survive the cold, so he made a decision that affected me for the rest of my life. He took his coat and placed it over her while she slept, leaving himself to freeze to death. I went home that night and scribbled some words down in poem form. A few days ago I came across it in one of my files and, having a son and daughter of my own now, was profoundly touched again by the incredible power of love. I am no poet, so I have not tried to rewrite my words since I first put them down.
Love
My friend and I stopped short
Amidst our mindless laughter
Ears turned to the radio news
And eyes meeting in silent wonder
A father and daughter
Lost in the snows of January mountains
The wreckage of their plane
Their trifling shelter
And only the cold sub zero night ahead
What did they say to each other?
What was important to them
With the arctic death approaching?
And what, was the question in
The eyes of my friend and me,
What moved within that man’s heart?
What power that existed within us, too?
That he would wait for his daughter
To succumb to a shivery sleep
Then remove his winter coat
And place it over her, so that she might live
In the morning she awoke
To a frozen, peaceful corpse.
The news item ended, the silent wonder
In our eyes faded away
And we resumed our work.
Now, over thirty years later, I am still touched by that single unselfish act of love. I remember a teacher saying that “love is so perfect that if even a drop of love touches something it makes that thing perfect, too.” And it never fades away. That father’s love touched something inside me and transformed it into love. I am sure this happened to the people that knew him or his daughter, as well as many of those that heard the news. Some may have looked on the event as a tragedy, but that day I discovered that there is no such thing as a tragedy as long as love is present. A woman who lost her son to brain cancer told me that it was a sad experience but also a beautiful one because the way he handled his illness taught her how to love, while his confrontation with death taught her how to live.
My experience of love is that it is a great and wonderful mystery that stops my mind whenever I contemplate it, but I do not really know what it is. In my day to day life I am often tempted to doubt its power or usefulness in the face of the difficulties that come with existence on this planet. That is why these acts of pure love shine out in my mind so clearly. After experiencing the effects of a number of them I realised that I was being called to be a living example of that power myself. This realisation did not come with trumpets and fanfare or any glamorous side effects because it is the same calling that each one of us is being sent every moment of our lives. In fact we are given the opportunity to embody the perfection of love regularly. The opportunity comes to us with each choice we are presented, because every choice is between love and fear.