I teach History. But...if I could teach just one selection of literature in my whole life, I would choose this sonnet, Shakespeare’s 116th:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to ev’ry wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I first heard it read aloud on an old cassette of the soundtrack to the ‘80s series, Beauty and the Beast. This sonnet, in combination with Matthew Arnold’s, “She walks in beauty like the night...” filled my adolescent ears with an almost palpable nostalgia I couldn’t escape or understand. I don’t know that I comprehended much more of the poem than that Shakespeare believed two minds could marry. Even now, the thought makes me sigh. He said two minds, not two hearts. The prospect of uniting my mind with someone else’s feels as dreamily impossible at 34 as it did at 15. Incomprehensible nostalgia isn’t why I want to teach this sonnet, though.

I want to share Shakespeare’s almost incomparable definition of love with pop-culture-drugged students. He captures love’s essence even down to the sound of the words he chooses: “...within his bending sickle’s compass come...” Read that line aloud a few times. The rhythmic sounds of those hard c’s mimic the sickle of Time cutting into rosy lips and cheeks, and he goes on to say that Love persists despite the harsh blade of Time. It’s perfection, I tell you.

If I taught this sonnet, I would have to pair it with I Corinthians 13. Each selection equally praises constancy and steadfastness as the mark of love. Paul, in I Corinthians, goes beyond Shakespeare to claim that if “I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am nothing.” In his straightforward prose, Paul agrees with Shakespeare: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful...love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

I woke up this morning with both descriptions of love churning around in me. About ten years ago, I joined with people I didn’t know at all to build a church in Atlanta. As a member, I vowed to “practice the purity and peace” of this community. I came to love and depend on so many brothers and sisters profoundly, as we worked together to figure out what it means to follow Christ. Now, I find myself on the other side of the world and hear of fractures appearing, of relationships being tested. Time’s bending sickle is cutting into the community. The rosy lips and cheeks of new friendships and a new building and a new excitement about worship are perhaps fading. My heart and mind desperately need the reminder that love alters not when it alteration finds.

I also need the reminder that Love finds its only constant origin in God. My love on its own will alter when it finds alterations in the people or communities I love. I am full of envy and arrogance. I can only be patient when I’ve slept well, and I have a hard time believing that my own way is not the best. So, ultimately, what binds me with these brothers and sisters in Atlanta is not our own ability to look on tempests and remain unshaken. Rather, we jointly seek God’s unchanging hand of Love to redeem our broken human loves. Here’s William Rees’s beautiful description of Divine Love. It’s one of my favorite hymns:

Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout Heaven’s eternal days.

On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God’s mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And Heaven’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.