“You’ll love me at once the way you did once upon a dream,” the classic Disney song danced around my fingers on the harp strings.
This month I took my harp to the movies playing love songs like Unchained Melody from Ghost, Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and As Time Goes By from Casablanca. I even snuck in some Disney.
These cinematic songs are favorites across my audience. Little girls twirl to Disney. Seniors sigh delighted at Moon River. Last week I saw a gentleman visiting his wife at an Alzheimer’s unit holding her hand and crying into a large white handkerchief during “As Time Goes By.” Movie music sticks in out minds and our dreams.
In fact, these movies and songs are often the source of our dreams in the first place. We first hear about love in love songs, or see it in Disney princesses. We’re told to “Dream a little dream of me” and the stories fill our imaginations whether we’re as sound asleep as Sleeping Beauty or just day dreaming to Mr. Sandman. We’re told love is a dream and the people we love will fill those dreams.
But if you’ve been in love, you know it’s not all like the movies (here my audience of eighty year olds nod knowingly). Sometimes those dreams just feel like movie moonshine.
It’s not that our movie dreams are too big but too small, just an echo of a larger love that neither tongue or pen can ever tell. Sweeping the last notes of Sleeping Beauty’s waltz to a close, I introduce my last love song for February, The Love of God is Greater Far.
We need a love that’s bigger than the movies and bigger than the songs, that can last longer than a lifetime and is wider than our wrong turns. We need a love “measureless and strong,” as it says in the hymn.
But just as I finish that resounding romance on the Amen chord, a gentleman who has been sitting in the front row, hunched in his wheel chair, raises a trembling hand to ask me to play Jesus Loves Me. It’s one of his favorites. It’s one of my favorites too. Maybe the love of God outstrips our description but it’s still described very well. “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.”
And that’s a wonderful way to wake up.
Happy Valentine’s Day! If you have a favorite love song or movie theme you would like me to play, add a comment and pick up my recording of Jesus Loves Me on my CD, Hymns and Variations here or on iTunes.