On Love and Charity

 Love one another. Is this enough? Love your enemies, too. The theological virtue of Love is a path, loving others through love of God as the strength of love for God makes all loves possible. Then again, your enemies are trying to destroy you. What would happen if enemies love each other? Peace on earth? Embrace an enemy today?

Be good to them that despise you: to say you’ll pray just makes them angry. Love is an action. Preach the liberation of the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. Free the oppressed.

Love saves. Mainly it saves you. The desperate love of parent for child; the passionate love of the Song of Songs: love is hardly love without emotion. Charity, however, may seem unloving love, cold as charity a proverb. Who is my neighbour? Share dignity with charity: receive the same.  Let charity be shown to you. God knows the need.

Love saved the weeping woman at Christ’s feet. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much.” Or with Tyndall: “To whom lesse is forgiven, the same doeth lesse love.” Who is my family? More love, more family. You are one of all of Us.

On Productivity

 

The King has waited all his life for the work or destiny decided before his birth. But so have others. Those with genetic diseases, for example, a decision made at the time of conception. And one unknown perhaps for years, coming astonishingly as a sudden strike. Those who inherit unexpectedly from a will written without their knowledge. Those who unexpectedly fail to inherit.

Productivity. A process of time. And our role it. And a mystery. Does productivity mean we’re a product? Not necessarily something for sale, but something resulting. Resulting from many processes, acts and events. Something productive is that which produces.

This leaves us with what to produce. Lift-off takes a lot of energy. Some birds have to eat their own weight every day to keep up. Looking back at life, we cared so much about so many temporary things. So much time consumed in entertainment. Something to furnish our thoughts.

 What will we produce? What processes, acts, and events will we nourish or discourage? What results from our motivations and desires? More stress, ambition, confusion, casting of wide nets? Or more clarity, understanding, acceptance, and peace? More love, consideration, and care. Be productive. Love more.

On Loving Enemies

2 December 2019

I was recently asked to love my worst enemy; hard to discover who that might be. Love is one of the hardest terms to define and there’s a dearth of defined words out there. Arguments spin around rebutting meanings unintended, unexpressed. Cross-communication.

What do we mean by love? Am I to love as mother and child love: complete dependency, attachment, protection, tenderness? Wouldn’t it be curious to love as lovers do: intense desire, possession, attraction, singularity? What about family love: exclusiveness, blood ties, responsibility, bonding? Or love of country?  Patriotic love to die for, or heart-rending love of dispossession? Self-abandoning love of God? The love of money, of course, is the root of evil, often the branches, too.

If the love of friends, as the ancients believed, will always seek the good for a friend, is this close enough to love of enemies who by definition always seek harm for an enemy? Now who is out there seeking harm for me? Don’t answer that. Wouldn’t it be safer to seek the good for everyone? Not specific enough? Wishing honour, dignity, well-being and divine favour to my dearest enemy? Christ approaches. Not for nothing is he called the Prince of Peace.