A couple of years before I came to the U.S. I took a trip to Sicily. I used a beautiful book as guide, one that stands as a classic for travel in that mysterious island, half Africa, half Europe. It was Vincent Cronin’s The Golden Honeycomb and its title refers to the legend of a honeycomb cast from wax by Daedalus, the famed craftsman and father of Icarus. This holy grail of antiquity was reportedly last seen in the city of Syracuse on the Mediterranean isle.  The author’s guide was a spiritual quest for the honeycomb, if not a physical one. For me fetching up in Syracuse, New York, had quite some irony in light of that earlier journey. I wondered whether, like Cronin, I was searching for a golden honeycomb!

Did I find it?

The honeycomb has always been a fascination. Its hexagonal cell structure caught the attention of Greek mathematicians and was used by Roman architects. The way it is put together by a collective of small insects working together without blueprint is a parable of the amazing possibilities hidden in life itself.

The truly beautiful thing, however, is the end quality of the honeycomb’s overall design–it is a dense gathering of empty spaces. An ingenious architecture of emptiness, providing maximum space with minimum material. It seems totally fitting that into this amazing space something as fabulous as honey should be poured. An architecture of emptiness for a sweetness of the gods!

Today, however, the vastness of outer space beckons us to darkness. What possible importance or meaning can we have in something so crushingly big? Meanwhile, at the other end, the saw of science cuts down to the smaller and smaller, and there seems to be absolutely nothing between the enormous orbits of neutrons and electrons! All this nothing is terrifying and threatens to suck our souls into endless, pointless…nothing.

But we should not step so quick! Somewhere along the line those electrons and neutrons resulted in the honeycomb, and at least at one point in the universe the point of empty space was given as sweetness.

We are faced with a challenge. The human imagination is itself a super honeycomb–a hundred billion cells inside the head folded over and around each other in impossible polygonal structures and sequences. What intricate pathways of thought are provided by our mind and our world! But is there a cast of thought which still remains to be wrought? Is there a sweetness to come, hardly yet dreamt?

We can imagine certainly that all this empty space is in order that it be filled with love. For love is the greatest sweetness we know, and it has its own special relationship to empty space.

Love is movement into empty space, taking the risk of movement to the other. Only empty space will make for love–to reach out to the other you have to cross empty space toward her. Indeed, love thrives on the nothing it crosses, in order to be truly itself. But, then, once it crosses the space, the space is changed. It is no longer nothing. It has become filled with something wonderful and new–the unique unconditional sweetness of love. Our hearts (which is just a word/metaphor for the deep sequences of the neural honeycomb in our heads and bodies) know and experience this.

Thus the architecture of empty space is the condition for the experience of love. The honey supposes the honeycomb. Can we say it the other way round, that the honeycomb begs the prior existence of the honey, in the metaphorical meaning we have given it? That empty space presupposes love? No, despite the attraction of the metaphor, that is an argument that takes condition to be cause. And if indeed we could say that and be sure–that the empty space proves the prior existence of love–then there would no more be empty space. It would be filled with a definite metaphysical something, and we would never truly learn to love. On the other hand, to take the empty space as the final definition of reality, and love as a noble but self-exhausting gesture into that dark night, that is also to go too far, and another form of metaphysics. How can we conclude with certainty that in the end love will not win? That it will not fill everything with the unconditional giving of love? That the honeycomb will not be crammed with honey? Indeed, to reach this conclusion goes against the character of love itself–which “believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Perhaps, therefore, what we could and should say is this: if one were to set up a universe for the sake of love, this is precisely the kind of universe you would have to set up. There is a love-fittingness to our universe!

For love continues to urge toward its further pouring out, just as the beekeeper will decant the honeycomb into a jar. And because it continues to urge to be poured out we get a sense of its eternity: its self-dispossessing, paying-it-forward going on forever. Love has to be eternal in this endlessly forward giving sense. And once we practice and feel the future eternity of love it creates its own modality of the past, pulling the past behind it. For love cannot arise out of the self-consuming entropy of present being. It demands its  own dynamic “before” to self-dispossess, and so create a love that would go on to self-dispossess, and so on.

That is why, I think, John’s Gospel has the audacity to say that “in the beginning was the Word. ” Because the Word was made flesh and experienced in Christ as the authentic movement of love, then for that to be possible the love must somehow always have been there.

One day studying in Syracuse I came across a saying of the Stoics: “God drips through the universe like honey through a honeycomb.” Christianity was born in a world where Stoicism had a huge influence on the educated classes. It was one of the ways in which the Gospel gained purchase in Roman society and culture. Today we lack this cultural matrix; rather we have the emptiness of space. But, as I said, a metaphysical doctrine, like that of the Stoics, can now be seen as an obstacle to love. So our culture today is tailored for actual love not metaphysics. To seek to fill your particular appointed hexagon with honey, is that not the best chance of one day discovering the whole honeycomb of love? Of one day looking up and seeing those inconceivable reaches of space an endless artwork of gold?