I last posted this video several years ago, first deploying it in 2014 for the Easter after the death of my father. Then, it felt needful to me to believe that the certain, eventual loss of those we love need not affirm that life is largely meaningless. Such feelings have stirred again for me now, with the death of my best friend, Dr. Joe P. in November, as noted in recent posts.

For unlike my 93 year-old father, Dr. Joe’s passing seemed callous and even perverse, in that he was far younger and had done so much good in his life for others.  And as great as were the contributions (as a physician) of his extreme intelligence, in my view, his kindness and compassion were even finer gifts to the world. Truly noble and more fully human, ‘gifts’ whose value our current culture does not recognize, observe or honor enough. But the artistry in this video seemed to offer a bearable answer – which sensibility might, but reason, alone, cannot – to the ephemerality of even a life like Joe’s.

Rarely is a truly iconic image of Western Art like Michelangelo’s sublime Pieta combined with folk music like this Appalachian tune, yet in this astonishing video, this partnership is appropriately ‘wondrous.’ The force of the premise that super-human love could rescue all of us from our imperfect nature and consequent fixations may have inspired Michelangelo to create the breathtaking image of melancholy beauty here. As well as the singer who has given us this impossibly poignant interpretation of this hymn.

Though ‘wondrous love’ is especially associated with Jesus’ crucifixion, recalled on Good Friday, it would be a waste to evoke its power only once a year. It is not just available year-round; its presence, promise and succor encompass the beginning of time, to beyond its end.

We may reflect on wondrous love today as manifest in Christ’s sacrifice of His life, but can also rely on its constant ambience, like the air on which we depend, though seldom notice. Love of such scope is a dimension like time and space, background context of everyone and everything, a defining attribute of ‘Creation’ itself.

If Christmas is presented as being when incomprehensible, inexpressible hope entered the world, Easter is when that hope came full cycle  – a cycle I rejoice in now, in Joe’s memory – unveiling a death-negating tranquility. In effect, it offers us the option of ultimately joining an in-gathering of all things to God Himself, as at the ‘beginning of time.’

Sharing the Universe with such accessible bliss, we are never in this life ‘alone,’ even when we may fear or presume – or even wish – that we are. We are parts of something so inconceivably vast and pervasive that we may not even recognize that it exists, something implicitly greater than the Self alone, which Jesus surpassed, and overcame, on the cross.

And the ‘Other love’ shown on Good Friday, consummated in the Resurrection, asserts insistently that our lives have value – not always apparent even to ourselves, and not just as the instinct for self-preservation – for whose sake even crucifixion is worth suffering.