This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets
My wife personifies the Ideal Wife in Proverbs 31, which is not the subject of this post. This post is about our courtship some 26 years ago. Briefly, this was our courtship:
Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love,
When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side,
And make her your own
Or all through your life you
May dream all alone.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
That's right, a couple of verses from South Pacific's Some Enchanted Evening. I first heard Ezio Pinza sing it when I was a kid, and it has defined romance for me ever since.
So tonight I was browsing the Bible before Mass started. Let's try...Sirach. I get to Chapter 6:
"My son, from your youth up choose instruction, and until you are old you will keep finding wisdom. Come to her like one who plows and sows, and wait for her good harvest... Come to her with all your soul, and keep her ways with all your might." It's about Wisdom, but it made me think about my wife. And "Make her thy whole heart’s quest, follow, as best thou canst, the path she makes known to thee," which reminded me of our courtship, and Some Enchanted Evening. Then "search, and thou wilt find her, hold fast, and never let her go."
If Oscar Hammerstein wasn't riffing on Sirach when he wrote that lyric then this is a bigger vale of tears than I thought.
P.S. Sirach is a deuterocanonical book. I do wonder how Hammerstein might have encountered it.
