From The Manse Window

WHOEVER chose the supermarket music must have thought we looked like a Seventies kind of crowd.

I was in the biscuit aisle when they played David Soul’s “Silver Lady”. They were playing “Now That We’ve Found Love” by Third World when I was in the jams and pickles aisle.

I was humming along when I walked straight past another man who was singing, “Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it.”

I looked back, hoping to share a smile, but he was lost in thought. He was in his sixties, overweight, balding and everything he wore was beige.

I didn’t look at all like that, I decided. My clothes were all shades of blue.

A woman returned to the shopping trolley and took over.

“So you got married,” the devil’s advocate in my head said. “You didn’t do much with it, did you?”

I shut that thought down straight away. I couldn’t know what marriage had asked of them.

I had no idea the good they’d done, the difficulties they’d overcome, the people who might only be in this world because these two turned love into a marriage.

A successful marriage is no easy thing and ought to be considered a real achievement.

What did I do with it, I asked myself. Same as him. What else is there?

We downplay love and its potential sometimes.

We take it for granted.

I remember my gran saying when I was a child, “You can have the TV on or the light. You don’t need both.” And she was right.

The first two houses she lived in didn’t have electricity. She knew what life without it was, so she valued it.

I, on the other hand, leave lights and the TV on when I’m not in the room.

There was a long time, before it was harnessed and put to use, when electricity existed – but no-one knew it was there. Then it changed everything.

Imagine if love was a bona fide power in the universe like electricity, with the power to change everything.

We aren’t told that God is electricity. No, he, according to Bible, is a greater power. The greatest power. He is love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the 19th-century scientist and theologian, thought that “after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity”, we might harness the power of love and it would be like the discovery of fire all over again.

Love can actually change lives and is the ultimate force for good. How might we, once we find our place in it, use it?

We might make small differences; we might make a larger impact. The real shame, with so much of that good stuff all around us, would be not to use it.

So the question remains: now that we’ve found love (and I sincerely hope you have), what are we gonna do with it? ■

Next week: Andrew Watson looks at the birds.