Someone asked me what I think romantic love is, and this is what I said: I think all of us have a deeply embedded, loving, trance-like state of being where who we really are comes out. You can call it "flow" or "samadhi" if you want to be fancy about it but I just think of it as "childlike." How we were with our families when we were young. There are different things - "objects" if you have to be psychological about it but let's not - that pull you into this state. That process you. Sometimes it's a beautiful piece of music, sometimes an unforgettable painting, sometimes a memory or just a thing in the world that has special significance to you. When it's a person that pulls you into this absorption, this simple, beautiful, un-self-conscious way of being, we experience romantic love for them. Love says, you bring out the deepest and truest part of me. And if we are really careful with that - if we protect it, and nurture the deepest, truest, most fragile parts of each other - then these simple, loving, familiar selves grow and become durable in us. We elaborate them. We make them real in the world. They become structures in ourselves, in each other, in our homes and our work. And those structures pull us more and more, deeper and deeper into the experience of union - with our beloved, with everything, with God. When kids are born in a place like this, to people like this, into a world that's totally, hopelessly shot through with love, they are healthy and happy and whole, and they go on to create themselves in the world in the same way - through their art and work and relationships and struggles. That's how love perpetuates in the world. That's what God is, in a very real sense.