broken bread
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Love
I must admit to having become quite uncomfortable with the word "love".
I know...that sounds terrible.
This is not some sort of bitter response to love sickness, rejection or heartache. As in, "I'll never fall in love again", or some such thing.
This is simply a product of experience and reflection.
Romantic love...ahh!...that devious manipulator of the will, so skillful at cloaking the effects of boiling hormones into poetry...
...clearly, this kind of "love" is much closer to hatred than any kind of "friendship".
In fact, "love" does not reside in the same house as friendship...unless we re-define the word into something along the lines of "very close friendship"...which, in the end, is "friendship", not heart-bedecked "love"...
Then we have the purveyors of various faiths equating their respective gods with "love"...or shall we write "Love"...as in "God is Love"...
That certainly sounds innocent enough...unless we commit the phrase to the most rudimentary analysis (omniscient, omnipotent God coexisting with untold evil, suffering, misery, injustice, etc., etc.) = "Love"...yikes!!...someone, save me from such "Love".
I recently had to sit through the oration of an Archbishop. Our gospel choir (a quite secular routine, believe me) was invited to sing during the mass at a seminary, and I foolishly agreed. We were placed up front with the Archbishop and what seemed like an army of priests (my grandfather would be spinning in his grave), so I had to sit there expressionless as we listened to this man - whose hateful politics label anyone who doesn't "love" the way he and his cohorts in the Vatican have currently defined as acceptable as "unnatural" and wrong...even sick - go on about "Love". Lots of incense, lots of low humming harmonies from the priests...and nothing whatsoever showing that this man knows anything about the real life that goes on around him. His kind of "Love", and that of Christians in general, somehow fits with hatred of the other, harsh judgments, perverse visions of hell for all those who do not follow the line (virtually everyone, in their private life), not to mention war, murder, torture, etc. etc.
I'll pass on their kind of "Love", thank you.
As I will on the more secular, but no less socially problematic kind of "love" - that exercise in unabashed selfishness directed at the heart and soul of another person.
I know...that sounds terrible.
This is not some sort of bitter response to love sickness, rejection or heartache. As in, "I'll never fall in love again", or some such thing.
This is simply a product of experience and reflection.
Romantic love...ahh!...that devious manipulator of the will, so skillful at cloaking the effects of boiling hormones into poetry...
...clearly, this kind of "love" is much closer to hatred than any kind of "friendship".
In fact, "love" does not reside in the same house as friendship...unless we re-define the word into something along the lines of "very close friendship"...which, in the end, is "friendship", not heart-bedecked "love"...
Then we have the purveyors of various faiths equating their respective gods with "love"...or shall we write "Love"...as in "God is Love"...
That certainly sounds innocent enough...unless we commit the phrase to the most rudimentary analysis (omniscient, omnipotent God coexisting with untold evil, suffering, misery, injustice, etc., etc.) = "Love"...yikes!!...someone, save me from such "Love".
I recently had to sit through the oration of an Archbishop. Our gospel choir (a quite secular routine, believe me) was invited to sing during the mass at a seminary, and I foolishly agreed. We were placed up front with the Archbishop and what seemed like an army of priests (my grandfather would be spinning in his grave), so I had to sit there expressionless as we listened to this man - whose hateful politics label anyone who doesn't "love" the way he and his cohorts in the Vatican have currently defined as acceptable as "unnatural" and wrong...even sick - go on about "Love". Lots of incense, lots of low humming harmonies from the priests...and nothing whatsoever showing that this man knows anything about the real life that goes on around him. His kind of "Love", and that of Christians in general, somehow fits with hatred of the other, harsh judgments, perverse visions of hell for all those who do not follow the line (virtually everyone, in their private life), not to mention war, murder, torture, etc. etc.
I'll pass on their kind of "Love", thank you.
As I will on the more secular, but no less socially problematic kind of "love" - that exercise in unabashed selfishness directed at the heart and soul of another person.
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