Ok, so this has to be one of the tritest phrases anyone has ever spoken. It is Love Story, Harry Meets Sally, and other every romantic movie you’ve ever seen trite—yet here’s the thing, it’s a genuine feeling many of us have felt at one time, even if we are embarrassed in retrospect at having said it. It seems to pop up out of thin air and present itself to us—unbidden and certainly unexpected—that feeling of being so connected to another soul that we are somehow incomplete without them. Those of you who are bent on finding scientific explanations can put this down to a sudden surge of oxytocin or some other hormones, but I have a different explanation.

Let me start by saying that Love—real love, not the stuff of greeting cards and mawkish movies is a hard thing to pin down. We know it when we feel it—the real thing—but it surprises us, and sometimes we question what we are feeling, ready to dismiss it as infatuation, or—dare I say it—bald faced lust. That is not what I am talking about. If we know ourselves even a little bit we can recognize the genuine article from the fake.

Real love is nothing like that, in the words of the Apostle Paul: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

These words, which have probably been part of the wedding vows of millions of couples, sum up an ideal we have about how love is, or at least should be. And here is the funny part, they are told to us by Paul, a man so unlikely to express such sentiments that we can hardly believe our ears. You remember Paul, the scourger of Christians, the converted Pharisee (lawyer/scholar in my terms)? This didactic pedant, who instructs the Corinthians on every niggling detail of how to live their lives, who arrogantly dispatches moral pronouncements and dictums as if he were himself the law—that Paul.

How does Paul know anything at all about love? It’s hard to imagine he ever felt anything much like it –certainly not romantic love, and yet here he is telling us something that we know is true. So, either Paul had a past completely hidden from historians and biblical scholars, or there is something else we are missing. Can it be that Love is an immutable law, something that is greater even than the universe?

I wrote last week about Adam and Eve, the prototypical couple. The creation story suggests Eve is made from Adam (the first and only time a man ever gave birth) and they were joined by God in a sort of matrimony, and as we all know, what God has joined together no man may put asunder.

In the garden, Adam and Eve are innocents—they know only love. It is not until they are put out of the garden that they feel for the first time that yearning to be back, to be where they were and to feel again what they once felt. They, and the rest of mankind spend their entire lives trying to get back to where they were—to no avail, at least not in this world. But every once in a while we get to experience what they felt—real love—a connectedness to one another that transcends every other feeling.

Hold on for the mind-blowing part. That feeling of complete and total love, acceptance and contentment, that my friends is God. Stay with me here. What Adam and Eve are feeling when they are cast out is their separation from God—not each other. They are still walking hand in hand—it’s just not the same. What’s missing is God. He is the source of Love, and without him Adam and Eve are living a hollow, empty existence.

So, when we have those moments where we are overwhelmed with feelings of love, when our emotions overtake us with their power, what we are feeling is God loving us. Love is divine, it is not of men but of God, and when we love as humans the way God loves us, we are what God told us, just a little less than him. That is why we feel complete, united, and content, because we are home—even if for just a brief moment, we are back in the Garden with God.