Love & Passion Quote by Lionel Blue

Denied the one thing religion usually presumes to bless, Lionel Blue turns deprivation into a kind of fierce lyric. “I was not allowed a physical lover” lands with the cold force of institutional language: not “I chose,” not even “I couldn’t,” but “was not allowed” - the passive voice of rules that outsource cruelty to doctrine. The line makes celibacy sound less like a vow than a border checkpoint.

Then he pivots: “Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.” The capital-L Love is doing double duty. It’s a theological abstraction (God, agape, the officially sanctioned object), and it’s also a protective euphemism - the way you rename hunger so it hurts less. Blue doesn’t romanticize the substitution; he frames it as a consolation prize, a second-best intimacy offered to someone whose first-best option has been vetoed.

The intent is quietly accusatory without becoming a slogan. Blue, a clergyman who was also publicly gay, is pointing at the psychological choreography demanded by certain religious cultures: transmute desire into devotion, turn a body into an idea, make “spirituality” carry what relationship is supposed to carry. The subtext is that this alchemy can be sincere and still be a loss. There’s poignancy in the admission that he did, in fact, fall in love - he just had to choose a partner that couldn’t hold him back.