CARDINAI. HUME told an audience of students on Tuesday of a "very personal" experience of love in his teenage years, while a pupil at Ampleforth, writes Andrew M Brown.
He said there was "no need to elaborate" on the experience, but observed that love could "raise us to the heights, and also plunge us to the depths" of despair. "Human love can be fickle. But in my teens I began to learn that in some way we are made for love, and that all true human love, however transient and imperfect, has in it something of the infinite and eternal," he said.
The Cardinal, who was speaking at Salford University, said he had decided, "shyly", to employ "a little vulgar self-exposure" to illuminate the subject "Jesus Christ today" for his young audience. Talking so personally "went against every novice master's instruction to his novices," but "very often people want to discover not so much what you know, but what it means to you."
He also recalled one of his earliest childhood memories, of seeing a coffin being borne through the streets of Newcastle, which led him to reflect that "death could only make sense as the prelude to a richer, more lasting existence".