Love Me Tender, Love Me Long: Take Me To Your Heart

Has your reception of a song

ever been radically altered? Have you ever found yourself listening to the lyrics one way all your life only for them to be irrevocably changed by a single moment in time? Has something seemingly so secular ever transformed before your very ears into the holiest of melodies?

A couple of years ago, Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender" became one such instance for me. I had been sitting in the adoration chapel of my college parish, pouring out my heart during a season of great heartache. I didn't have a "word of the year" during this period of my life, but quite often the notion of being gentle, tender, and patient would come to the forefront of my encounters with the Lord. I wanted so desperately for him to teach me how to be gentle with myself, and even more so I wanted to learn how to trust in the truth of his love for me. In this place, the phrase that kept coming up was this plea for him to "love me tender." While I knew the phrase was the title of a famous ballad, it seemed ordinary enough to stand alone outside of that context, not needing to inherently be a reminder or a reference back to a moment in popular culture.

Yet, the more I asked for his tenderness, the more I wondered about the full lyrics of Presley's song. I had known the title for seemingly all my life, but what were the words that surrounded it? Upon looking them up for the first time, I found that the first two verses went as follows:

Love me tender, love me sweet

Never let me go

You have made my life complete

And I love you so

Love me tender, love me true

All my dreams fulfill

For, my darling, I love you

And I always will

I could hardly believe it. Love me tender; love me sweet; never let me go: these were the longings of my soul in that chapel. I could not fathom that the words had already been written decades prior. This was the call of my restless heart. This was the cry from the wilderness of my being out to the still, small voice who could answer it. Love me, O Lord, and never let me go. Even in the struggle and the heartache, I knew it would be him that would make my life complete if I could only surrender myself to that belief wholeheartedly. "Love Me Tender" encompassed the vision I always dreamt of when it came to having a relationship with God. I wanted to be so captivated by the Bridegroom that the appeal that sprang from my lips would be one of quiet, assured love. The request to be loved tender, sweet, and true, after all, is not a desperate one; it is sung in confidence, not posed as a question with an unknown answer but as a statement with trust in the declaration’s deliverance. What sweeter lyrics could there be? Or ones more raw and honest? It's in the simplicity of this desire laid out that I found a radical beauty and it was in the following verse that the fullness of it lay:

Love me tender, love me long

Take me to your heart

For it's there that I belong

And we'll never part



While I saw glimpses before of how the song could be sung to our Lord, it was here that it forever changed for me. No longer was it a simple ballad sung by a man to the woman he loves; rather, it became the longing of my own heart to be close to Jesus's Most Sacred one. Take me to your heart. Take me into yourself, O Lord, I prayed, that I might find shelter in your most precious side. 

It's this placing of oneself in the wounds of Christ — finding our littleness there and in turn our comfort — that the saints, in their wisdom and eloquence, write about and here, in the lyrics of a song written sixty-five years earlier, lay that same concept. St. Francis de Sales equated this need to be taken to the heart of Christ to the birds and the woodland animals: "birds have nests in trees and stags have thickets where they can find shelter when the need arises… so also our hearts should each day choose some place, either on Mount Calvary or within our Lord’s wounds, or in some other place near him, as a retreat where they can retire at various times to refresh and restore themselves…” There is no greater respite than to be tucked away in the recesses of the Bridegroom himself, than being nestled in his pierced side next to his triumphant heart. 

I realized, while sitting in that chapel reading over these words, that my instinct had always been to retreat into my own broken heart. Whether spurred on by a desire for self-preservation, grown out of a fear of abandonment and rejection, or rooted in a well of insecurity, the habit I had fostered and the belief I had watered was that of retreating into myself rather than surrendering myself to Another. Retreat kept me on the defensive, constantly in a state of distrust and unrest, never finding pause to lay my burdens down. What I needed was a true surrender. I needed to be the doe that sought out the thicket as shelter and allowed that space to restore her. 

Little did I think that the Lord would teach this to me through an Elvis Presley song, but that reveals the nature of his knowledge and his love for us. The Lord knew in that season of my life and in the longings of my heart that I needed a reminder of Love himself. And when so much of love has been misunderstood and secularized beyond recognition, what better way to bring me back to him than to make holy and to let himself be found in the lyrics of a modern ballad. It was a reminder that the desire to be loved tender can only ever truly be filled by Christ and no degree of the earthly measure would ever satisfy my heart. I am no different than St. Augustine: my heart would be restless until it found rest in Him. 

And so these words became my prayer then and live on as my prayer still: love me tender, love me long, take me to your heart: for it’s there that I belong.