No Quarrel

Veteran comics know that they can always get a laugh by dipping into their storehouse of husband-and-wife jokes — lover’s quarrels. For example …

“My wife and I had a fight last night.”

“How did it end up?”

“She came crawling to me on her hands and knees.”

“What did she say?”

“Come out from under that bed, you coward!”

A lover’s quarrel, it has been said, “is like a storm at sea; all the fury is on the surface, but underneath there is a deep current of love.”1

Engraved on the tombstone of poet Robert Frost are the words: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Frost himself chose that epitaph. What it means, really, is that he had a lover’s quarrel with God. And, whether we realize or not, the same is true of us all. We have an ongoing lover’s quarrel with the world and with God because of the evil we encounter in…