Blog 2997 – 01.13.2024
Broken Vow
Josh Groban’s tearful love ballad is one of my favorites. It is one of the great ironies of life that loving someone with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength does not guarantee that they will love you back or that even if they say “I do” that they will not at some point break that vow. The broken hearted lover in today’s song desperately wants to get past “asking why” to the place where he can reclaim at least some happy memories of the time before the broken vow.
How often a betrayal causes us to question if anything preceding it was real. Like Dusty Springfield’s song it really does seem like “the end of the world” to find out that someone we dearly love does not love us anymore, making us question if they ever did, or if we have any reason to go on living.
We can go on living when we find something more than a broken vow to hold on to – the promise of the possible. In the movie Mystic River the young man who has lost the girl he was intending to run away with the next day, tells the detective investigating her murder how much he loved her and that even he knows that a love like that only comes along once. The older, wiser cop says, “Not even once for most.”
The poet of old, Lord, Alfred Tennyson, had inscribed on the tombstone of his young friend, AHH (Arthur Henry Hallam)“ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
It is natural for us to mourn the loss of love and betrayal seems as harsh as a sudden death. Over coming such a great loss, and indeed some never do, requires us to find and hold on to the gifts of love however brief or long we were privileged to know them. Lovers in their passion often promise to love forever. A sad country song says, “If love never lasts forever, tell me, what’s forever for.”
All lovers hope for the fairy tell ending, “They lived happily ever after.” Still I believe with the poet ‘‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
Broken Vow
theencouragingword 