A few days before wedding #1, hanging out with everyone who had traveled into town for the occasion, it happened.

She walked into the room with grace, her smile luminous, her joy ineffable. She strolled–or did she float? I had no time to admire whatever her (undoubtedly adorable) feet were doing–across the room, and her eyes, passageways to worlds where agape reigns and red wine flows with unscrupulous delight, pierced right through… her boyfriend.

I watched the whole scene unfold in wonder. The moment she caught sight of him; the way her gaze was reciprocated by his; the embrace. Mind you, all of this occurred in a time briefer than it took to read this paragraph. But when you “fall in love with human love”, as a young Karol Wotyla once expressed it, time is an afterthought, an annoyance, a distraction.

A simple look cast into the eyes of another can speak eternity.

The rest of the weekend, I watched this same chain of events unfold a handful of times, as husbands embraced their wives and fiances shared longing looks of anticipation, each time cutting deeper into my heart than the previous.

What was it about this gaze, this simple glance between two lovers, that rocked me? I was in no way naive or ignorant of what, exactly, I committed to give up by choosing to enter seminary. I have, myself, been on the receiving end of that look in times past, though those memories have gotten awfully blurry (thanks to time and some concerted effort to simply forget). Yet, repeatedly I found myself pondering this question, never quite having enough time to piece it all together, to make total sense of what it was, precisely, that had gripped me.

After all, I felt bad for staring.