Moments of Ecstasy

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I heard a story of an old retired American priest who used to serve as a chaplain in France during the Second World War. During the confusion of war, the young chaplain stumbled upon a small farm house in the countryside, where a beautiful woman took care of him, bound his wounds, and told him about her admiration about things American. That night they made love, an experience he considered most humane amidst the brutality of war. Such awesome beauty of a woman, he sensed, fell from heaven and offered him moments of ecstasy, though fleeting as it seemed. He felt as if he was making love not only to the body but to the soul of this person amidst the cacophony of cannon blasts and machine guns. Although he never saw her again, that single night changed his life. He said, whenever he talked about marriage in the pulpit and whenever he gave talks to families, his thoughts returned to this single event with a woman, that one night stand with a beautiful woman, who offered herself as a gratitude to her liberator. She was, in effect, his “willing victim”, as the song goes. The flow of affection from body through the soul to God is clearly delineated in this story. Love is an outburst of affection going to different directions, animating the world. Love is not something logical, oftentimes it defies logic. Does love defy logic? What do you think? Photo credit: Pixabay