To Set the Earth on Fire

He means love.  He demands the impossible from man.  He doesn't realize that men are made for a happiness within bounds: a few years of companionship with someone more loved than the rest, a walk through the fields, or simply a bowl of strawberries.  A painting, a book, a bench in the shade.  A cozy fire.  A stroll in the biting night.  The flush of battle.  The majesty of death.  Always an eternal meaning, but contained within the precise contour of a moment.  That is sufficient and ineffable.  Here the world ripens and rounds itself out like a fruit and laden with such divine meaning it falls before the feet of the Eternal.  Ask the poets….

But for our interests he is a danger.  It was not wise of him to reveal himself so candidly, for his words sound like open revolt: I have come to cast down fire upon the earth, and what do I desire but that I should blaze high?

If he were to keep his soul's extravagance to himself, or if, for that matter, he were to make redemption flare high one glorious time before the ecstatic eyes of spectators in the performance of a fireworks of love, no one would have any objections.  We could then indulge our applause, "insistent, roaring applause," as the critics say, in gratitude for this unexpected and solemn occasion which has thus (and wholly free of charge!) come to enrich creation.  We would then justly be proud that the circus of the human heart, already so rich in extraordinary acrobats, should find its crowning climax in God's salto mortale. 

But he does not let matters rest there.  He sets his death jump up as a model; he lures men from their limits out into the same inevitably deadly adventure.  His fire is to burn on in others.  Now and then he actually succeeds, like dynamite, in blasting a soul into the air, and far and wide the windows rattle and the foundations of houses quake.