Have you read Jane Austen's Emma?  Or perhaps you've seen the movie.  It's a curious little book, one that I'm reading for a class I'm teaching.  I've read Pride and Prejudice, know quite a bit about her Mansfield Park, but not as much about Emma.
     Given what we know about Austen's penchant for puns, at times it's difficult to know exactly what she is up to in her narrative.  But it definitely seems as if she is putting the mores of her time (early nineteenth century England) under a microscope.  A single woman who has lived with her father all her life, Emma delights in matching people with each other.  She insists, however, that marriage is not for her.  Even when a man falls in love with her, begging her hand, she declines.  She's content to live with her widowed father in the luxury of his estate.
     In all of Jane Austen's novels, the woman who seems least likely to be married ends up getting married.  Emma is no exception.  She eventually falls in love with a Mr. Knightley, a man in whom she never thought she would be interested.  This brings me to my point.  We humans wrestle so much with the notion of love and how we work it out in our lives.  We fall in love, we may fall out of love, we may never find true love at all.  Either way, we rarely know when we will encounter love; it's almost always a mystery.
     This is what is wonderful, and vexing, about love:  it is a mystery.  But it's a good mystery.  And it's a mystery that wouldn't exist were not the world itself a mystery.
     Even if God didn't exist, however, love, and the world, would be mysteries.  Yet if God didn't exist, they would be mysteries which we, mysteries to ourselves in an accidental world, would have no way of knowing how to love.