Ingmar Bergman's 1951 film Summer Interlude was screened again in New York last week. In it, a ballet dancer, in a half-day break from rehearsals, revisits a resort where she had a love affair 13 years earlier. The film portrays the ecstasy of that summer love but also points to its impermanence; the movie makes it clear that the love won't last (the man dies). The ballerina, disillusioned, finds relief from melancholy through dance, theater, and masks, which build into what one critic calls "an overwhelming accession of bliss."

Was that summer love just an interlude? Must first loves always end and be followed by disillusion? Are people doomed to lives of melancholy? Despite so much human experience that screams yes, the answer really is a definitive no.

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" the Psalmist asks God and then continues, "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there" (Ps. 139:7, 8). The spiritual fact is that we're never separated from God, who is Love itself (see I John 4:16). We may think that love is lost, but that isn't the case, even if we characterize our present condition as hell itself.

You could say that that's what Marie, the ballerina in Summer Interlude, finds out. She throws herself into other things, dance among them, to find relief from the melancholy of her lost love—to find relief from the disillusionment and sadness that come from thinking that love is lost and is never to be had again, or at least that no love as good as that first one will ever come around again. But throwing herself into those other loves leads to that "overwhelming accession of bliss." Accession, according to at least one dictionary, means the act of coming into the possession of a right, title, office, etc.—a prince's accession to the throne as king, for instance. So what Marie was finding out was that love and bliss can't be taken from her; she has the right to claim them as hers, no matter what the circumstances. There's no interlude; love isn't a short-lived pleasure in a life of disillusion and drudgery. Love is a permanent fact; it's a right each one of us has.

"'God is Love,'" Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 6), quoting the Bible. She then continues, "More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go." We can't ask for more love than is always ours; we can't look for anything better; we can't go any farther than this perfect, always present, bliss-bestowing love. This is what St. John discovered in Revelation too, as Mrs. Eddy explains, saying "the sum total of human misery, represented by the seven angelic vials full of seven plagues, has full compensation in the law of Love" (Science and Health, p. 574). She adds a few lines later,

The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares. Then thought gently whispers: "Come hither! Arise from your false consciousness into the true sense of Love, and behold the Lamb's wife,—Love wedded to its own spiritual idea."