"A great love song is a moment of ecstasy frozen into words, a rhapsody of enthusiasm and passion, a metaphor pointing to a moment when the poet was lifted outside of himself to see reality in its ideal form...A love song is meant to seduce us from routine into a fantasized ideal of perfect love. God's love song is in many ways like other great love songs. Its human writer St. Paul was taken outside of himself and his ordinary level of experience and given a vision of ideal love... And yet his love song seems somehow meant for our living it. It draws a profile of ideal love, but it is too plain for mystic passion. Love is not jealous, does not get angry quickly, endures very much--these are qualities for ordinary living in ordinary days. This is our challenge: to find ways to bring the heavenly rhapsody down into our own worldly realities." Publisher