Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

“Tell me, O love of my soul, where you are going to pasture your flock…?” ”If you do not know, O most beautiful among women, follow the tracks of the flock.” (582) This exchange between the Beloved and the Lover, quoted from the Song of Songs in Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, recalled to me my favorite part of the Rigveda, hymn X.177, which I dubbed the Kindred Spirits hymn, after the elect set of people in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne books. The relevant concluding lines of X.177 read as follows (Jamison-Brereton translation): “The sage poets protect the flashing, reverberating inspired thought in the footprint of truth. I saw the cowherd who never settles down, roaming back and forth along the paths. Clothing himself in those that (alternatively) converge and diverge [=light beams?], he keeps rolling along within the living worlds.” The sage poet, like the kindred spirits, and again like the lovers in the Song, wends a way with no foreknown destination. “Roaming back and forth among the paths… he keeps rolling along with the living worlds,” like Anne Shirley on a romantic errand, or the lovers off to who knows where. This selected passage gave me an added insight on the kindred spirits. What is it that directs the steps of that spiritual caste? Is it love? Some of the Vedic poets themselves could be great lovers (I recall one hymn of thanks to a benefactor for supplying the poet with women who would give him “hundreds of spurts”), and Anne herself proved as good a lover, wife, and mother as she might have dreamed in her youth. JPII reminds us, though—reminiscent of Aristotle on friendship—that love will eventually turn sterile if the pair share no higher goal than one another. ”One has the impression that in reaching each other, in experiencing closeness to each other, they ceaselessly continue to tend toward something: they yield to the call of something that goes beyond the transitory content and seems to surpass the limits of eros…” (582) That is how he reads the mysterious invitation to “follow the tracks of the flock”; it is as if the herd animals are leading Lover and Beloved both into a new place they have never known before. Love can move the kindred spirits, but it itself is not the ultimate goal. It is merely one mediate reason they may tread the paths that lead them to divine secrets and intimacy. After the Rigvedic verse in another translation with the Sanskrit original, here’s an adorable yet alluring pic of Anne with a floral garland, which she surely gathered while “roaming back and forth along the paths”. Nb. The learned commentary on Wikipedia says X.177 is about discerning between reality and illusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(religion)#The_Vedas I will leave it to someone who has read on a deeper level to present connections on a deeper level, too. #PopeStJohnPaulII #PopeJohnPaulII #StJohnPaulII #JohnPaulII #JPII #ManAndWomanHeCreatedThem #TheologyOfTheBody #TOB #MichaelWaldstein #DaughtersOfStPaul #PaulineBooks #marriage #celibacy #theology #philosophy #CatholicChurch #Catholicism #CatholicGab #Catholic #Rigveda #Vedas #Hinduism #Hindu #LucyMaudMontgomery #LMMontgomery #AnneOfGreenGables #kindredspirits #literature #books