The World's Greatest Lover

There are only four questions of any value in life. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? And what is worth dying for. The answer to each is the same. Only love.

-Don Juan DeMarco

I was fascinated by the movie Don Juan DeMarco. The first time I saw it I didn’t really know why, and frankly I was a bit embarrassed about liking a movie about a man who was either crazy or the world’s greatest lover. Years later, and I’ve lost my embarrassment. When I first saw the movie, I missed the message of the movie for the content of the movie. Or maybe it’s better to say I almost missed the message of the movie for the content of the movie. I have lately been bitten by the romantics, and the bite has awakened some deeper magic in my soul.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

–G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I have long been intrigued by the logical C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity and Miracles were just the fuel my young hyperrational religious mind craved. Even the macabre Screwtape Letters fed not my imagination so much as my craving for propositional truth. But the thing that would undo me was The Chronicles of Narnia. A children’s series. How cute. As I read each night, strolling through the entire series to my children, I was on the surface thoroughly enjoying the story, but the deep of my mind was carefully parsing, extracting truth for the sermon that would come later. How naïve. I was in fact tricked by Lewis. All that logical, apologetic stuff was to hook me on the real truth—the romance of the story. The irony is of course that it is exactly the opposite he has been accused of by unbelieving critics—how sneaky of him to woo the unsuspecting by his fascinating stories and slip in his Christ-centered philosophies. The double irony is that I thought I was in his stands cheering for him to do just that, when all of a sudden the players all looked up to laugh at me—but I was not offended.

Lewis, like Madeleine L'Engle, Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others were greatly influenced, even fathered in a sense by George MacDonald. Lewis wrote of MacDonald, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; in deed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” In Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he revealed that it was George MacDonald’s Phantastes that sealed his fate on being a Christian (at the time he was quite irritated about it, but he obviously came to love not only MacDonald, but MacDonald’s God).

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance, by George MacDonald. It’s fantastic in every sense of the word. And romantic in only the best sense of the word. It is not ironic at all that in this passing age of reason and modernity that romance would be mocked, idealism patronized, and heroism tainted. Everything must be reduced, explained, understood, categorized, and filed accordingly: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” says the Wizard of Oz. “If it sounds too good to be true it probably is,” says the U.S. Post Office. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” gets skewed to somehow mean it’s an illusion rather than a gift from God to see the beauty that is truly there. But worst of all, they say “Love is blind” points to its naïveté rather than its magnificence! Love is only blind to the insignificant. What is true, what is noble, what is just, what is pure, what is lovely, what is admirable, what is virtuous, praiseworthy, and excellent—these things love sees quite well, only love truly sees. Although it may seem a bit arrogant to quote oneself, this is a verse from Fair Vera of Vérderah Wood.

Since ages past it was told unto thee
That love is blind and always must be
But now we know
For One did show
That love, only love can see.

Somewhere along the way the Romantics apparently got mixed up with the Erotics, and the Erotics must have killed off the good Romantics and taken the weaker ones as slaves. That’s the only explanation I have for the term “romance novels.” My guess is that the Rationals went on a war raid and scared the Romantics into their territory. But I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life. And I am becoming more concerned. A certain way of looking at life that doesn’t deny facts but looks through them like a glass of cold water on a hot summer day. A certain way of looking at life that does not begin with facts but believes they will come when they are due or maybe past-due to make sure faith gets a chance. Don Juan DeMarco had it. Most don’t. When his psychiatrist asks him how he explains some of the things he sees, how he can believe that he is in fact staying in a villa near Sevilla rather than a psychiatric ward, and that the man in front of him is in fact Don Octavio del Flores rather than Dr. Mickler, DeMarco replies:

By seeing beyond what is visible to the eye. Now there are those, of course, who do not share my perceptions, it is true. When I say that all my women are dazzling beauties, they object. The nose of this one is too large; the hips of another, they are too wide; perhaps the breasts of a third, they are too small. But I see these women for how they truly are...glorious, radiant, spectacular, and perfect...because I am not limited by my eyesight. Women react to me in the way they do, Don Octavio, because they sense that I search out the beauty that lies within until it overwhelms everything else. And then they cannot avoid their desire, to release that beauty and envelope me in it. So, to answer your question, I see as clear as day that this great edifice in which we find ourselves is your villa. It is your home and as for you, Don Octavio del Flores, you are a great lover like myself, even though you may have lost your way and your accent. Shall I continue?

Don’t get lost behind a mask and a cape and a sword and Hollywood. For it is neither Don Juan nor Don Juan DeMarco who is the world’s greatest lover. It is Jesus Christ. His claim to fame among the human race is exactly that. He was and is Love Incarnate, the greatest lover the world has ever known or will ever know. This Man saw beyond what was visible to the eye. He saw through the the veil of the visible. What else could he do, being the Son of the One who calls those things that be not as though they were? And God is counting on us to react to Him not because of the demands of His holiness, but because of His romantic sweep to seek and save what was lost in us (and no doubt it was lost, big time!). The incarnation, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ overwhelms everything else in us, and we cannot avoid our desire to release everything we are and envelope Him in it. His love for us was

“…not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love like there has never been in a play…”

- Viola in Shakespeare in Love

And while John and Peter both make much of the facts that Jesus was a real man who really walked the earth who had real relationships with real people and real troubles in the flesh whom they saw with their own eyes and touched with their own hands, Paul reminds us that the magic of Jesus, just like Isaiah had foretold centuries before, was not in the part you could see.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
   nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
   a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
   he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

- Isaiah 53

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”— but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

1 Corinthians 2

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

- 2 Corinthians 4

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life. It is only seen with the eyes of my heart. It is romantic to the core. The essence of it is the invisible trio of faith, hope, and love. The greatest of course is love—love that sees the unseen and acts in the most unrational ways for the love of the beloved.