Love Letters

Artist Andrew Wyeth wrote forty love-letters to his girlfriend Alice Moore. A Boston auction house plans to put ‘em on the block and thinks they could go for as much as $120,000. I make that three grand per epistle; nice work if you can get it. But that’s not even triple-A ball; one missive from Abraham Lincoln to his first fiancé gaveled in at $700K, still the all-time record. A less-juicy number still pulled in $110,000 a while back. One of Napoleon’s to Joséphine fetched nearly a half-mill. A racy on from Horatio Nelson weighed in at north of $175,000 and a mash note from Winston Churchill was good for a little under $114,000. To put that in perspective, one of his letters to Stalin went for a mere thirty thou.

Thomas Venning of Christie’s Auction House in London says it is the personal touch that rakes in the cash; the writer’s took a blank scrap of paper “and they filled it with a part of themselves.” It’s the unexpected vulnerability of powerful men that ups the ante. A letter from Joltin’ Joe to Marilyn Monroe outperformed one that Arthur Miller sent her, though one assumes that the award-winning playwright was the better writer.

It makes one wonder why Bibles don’t cost more.

The apostle Paul, a man not known for his sentimental side, after giving the church in Corinth a good talking to, winds up with, “My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.” (1 Cor 16.24) Peter the hard-handed fisherman writes to the church in the tenderest of terms, and survivors like James and Jude sometimes get downright sappy. Of course, in a larger sense, it is not this or that human instrument, but Almighty God who coos and woos His way through the sixty-six love letters that comprise Holy Scripture.

Perhaps the reason these astounding examples of love letters, blank blocks of parchment which the Creator in person and Persons fills with a part of Himself, fail to command big bucks is their general audience: God’s heart flows out to all humanity and each human being with a love that belongs to all, but reaches out to each.

I could never gin up the quarter-mil I’d need to buy Mick Jagger’s missives to his girlfriend-at-the-time, but I’m not too worried. I can, whenever I choose, listen to the Lord of Life declare undying and unconditional love recorded with an iron nail for a pen and the blood of Christ for ink.

And I wonder why I don’t do it more often or more eagerly.