The fond feelings have been replaced with something that resembles contempt. Children and teenagers witness this loss of love in their parents' marriage and react.
Disillusioned by their parents' failing love, they seek love among their peers and mostly in a destructive way such as sex outside of marriage which their parents disapprove. When people look back on their family relationships, they can only see guilt and regrets.
Lack of love robs us of community among our neighbors and frustrates our desire for peace in the world.
For instance, when we do not exhibit love, when we see our neighbor's children not deserving the love and attention we give our own children, we will not intervene in their mischief to avoid offending their parents. If we want to begin to resolve conflicts that lead to war, terrorism, oppression of minorities and the poor, and ethnic violence, we have to sacrifice for true love.
How many individuals possess such a love in this day where they would put their lives on the line to stand against the hatred? Saints and pioneers of the past have suffered greatly for the whole, but in our modern time it is a rare find an individual who suffers greatly for the whole.Somehow, the pipeline of true love has been broken. Love is thus the core of human striving and the raison d’etre of the created world.
No matter how deep the hurt, how intractable the trauma, no matter how profound the alienation or how deep the sin, love can seep in and penetrate like cleansing warm waters to ease the pain, salve the wound, and restore wholeness.
Love makes life on earth worthwhile, and it presages life in the next world as well.
Everybody, even those who deny it, yearn for love and yet, it eludes us. We seek it through love stories, relationships and everyday life.
The Centrality of Love
That “mysterious identity” is true love and God is love.
Psychologist M. Scott Peck said that issues of love were at the bottom of all the problems his patients struggled with. He asserted, “The essential ingredient of successful, deep and meaningful psychotherapy is love.”
Dr. Karl Menninger, a towering presence in medicine, observed, “Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” Health experts are finding that feeling loved is far more predictive of long life and good health than even such important factors as diet, exercise, and abstinence from smoking.
When a parent must discipline and educate their children of the way of the world, it is impossible and not effective unless one gives priority to the questions of love. When one sees the value in relation to love in every aspect of life, we can tackle and address any issue in life.
Teilhard described love as a force, mysterious yet binding, even on the molecular level. Within each entity in nature, from the most sophisticated and complex to the simplest, he found an observable attraction to other entities. Teilhard said, “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other.”He saw the entire universe as bound together, molecule by molecule, by the force of love: “We do not get what we call matter as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms. For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them.”
Many religions and cultural traditions call the beginning of this broken pipeline "the fall of man". It is the beginning of evil and sin flooding the gates of a once world of paradise where according to many traditions, man walked in oneness with God's heart. Many religions and cultural traditions call the beginning of this broken pipeline "the fall of man".
It is the beginning of evil and sin flooding the gates of a once world of paradise where according to many traditions, man walked in oneness with God's heart. Still, we have not exactly been able to pinpoint the true beginning of the problem in order to bring about a true solution to lead us toward peace. There is not enough love in the world, and where it exists, it is rarely true love that is connected to God. There are two kinds of love, false love connected to the fall and true love connected to God.
Love is a healer.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “In the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.”
When we do find love, we find out that it is rarely true. When we see this absence of true love in life, we can identify it as the root problem that colors human life with its dark and ambiguous hues.
If we were to define love, it is living for the sake of the other, which requires one to let go of ego and to sacrifice for the other.
For example, let's look at the relationships within a family. It is very hard to give and to continue to give to one another and forget what we have given.
When we do not have love for one another, it is hard to back down from blaming others, arguing, become power hungry or refrain from sowing seeds of resentment within each other.
This can be quickly remedied by looking at another's point of view, to listen and really understand their opinions and different interpretations on subjects. This is almost impossible to do without love being present.
When we look at the national level, patriotism is beautiful, but this level of love for nation falls short of what we need in order to acquire peace. In a way, nationalism is a form of self-love even though it is on a larger scale. This can take a monstrous turn.
Paul Tillich called it “a god who certainly proves to be a demon.”
Just take a look at North Korea, the last frontier of communism that wants to exalt its power and beliefs onto the world. Rarely will you see a nation that is capable of unselfish love that would b able to create lasting world peace on its own.
No matter how rich, successful or aloof a person is, we all desire for true love which dominates all human life.
Philosopher Erich Fromm noted that love “is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society.
The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction—self-destruction or the destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day.”
Even our very cells which flow through our body unceasingly responds to love, yearns for love and drives to seek for love. Our face was meant to communicate with others in love. The face is meaningless in isolation away from love.
From the arched eyebrows that rise in conveyed interest, to lips capable of smiles and words of affection, the old song rings true: “You were meant for love.” As Benjamin Disraeli observed, “We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.”
We all yearn for unity with another and others. This yearning for oneness in love is a glue that binds the universe together, thus, without love there is no existence.
When we search for the understanding of the principles that delineate a true way of life, there is no better way than to study the principles of true love.
When we catch on to true love, we feel that we can give all, risk all, love all for the sake of true love. It is what motivates a mother to run barefoot over glass to save her child. It moves an older student to confess to a teacher, "It is my fault," and to take a punishment that his younger brother may have incurred.
It was the motivator for Jesus to stand against his accusers, to love them after their beatings and taunts and to take the unjust way of the cross.
Love is a sustainer. As Viktor Frankl recounted of his life in a Nazi concentration camp:
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
“Death, where is thy sting?” Romeo inquired when he realized that his love for Juliet went beyond her demise.
“Death, be not proud,” penned poet John Donne, for love lasts beyond death. Many widows and widowers continue to love, talk to, and pray for their deceased partners, cherishing hopes of meeting again on the other side. The ultimate experience is that of divine love.
“Man is meant to be intoxicated by the love of God,” Reverend Moon has declared.
“Since humanity lost this original capacity, people seek unnatural, artificial intoxication—getting drunk on alcohol, marijuana, or other drugs. The perfect individual, however, is created to be intoxicated in God’s love. There is nothing that can go beyond this feeling of joy. Every cell in your body will explode with joy. Your eyes and ears, the tissues in your face, your arms and legs—everything will be newly alive in a rapture of joy.”
To paraphrase Saint Paul, no power, no principality, not even the gates of hell, can prevail against it. Inevitably, then, our search for the true way of life will take love as its major theme.
True love alone has the power to breach distances, resolve problems of opposites, and dissolving the complexities into an integrated whole. All of this only comes through true love and that alone.
>Return for Tomorrow's Post: Make New Relationship With God
This post was rewritten and derived from the Textbook: Educating for True Love
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