THE QUEST FOR A “CULTURE OF LOVE”

(I wrote this last February.)

It is Love month and love is in the air again. It is specifically the time of the year when my yearning for a blue rose is very strong, nearly overpowering. I know that one day it’s going to happen…in my dreams! Freud said: “dreams are the fulfillment of our wishes.” And I believe that.

Let’s talk things seriously over now. I was able to listen, at EWTN channel, to an impressive priest discussing about the so-called “culture of death”, which the main focal point was the discouragement of abortion. It is a call of the time in the western world because abortion has been considered a normal tendency for a time already, and made even legal in many other countries.

When I got to think about this very sad culture after that show, I thought that abortion is but one grave result of the absence of the opposite culture, the “culture of love”. Every waking moment of our life we see and commit murder, with or without intent. We are practically living in the midst of humans exercising a culture of death. We kill people slowly by the way we treat them, with unkind words, ironic or hostile behavior, or both. These ill behaviors and attitudes are actually our forms of rebellion, but we do not know this factually.

Our ignorance is killing us. It is by our sheer ignorance that we make decisions/choices consciously or unconsciously. There is so much to learn, and so much to unlearn. But we decide to remain lazy and/or prideful. We only read what we like to read, listen to what or who we would like to listen to, and do what only pleases us. We are spoiled-brats! And we are a very discriminating people, to our own disadvantage or destruction (?). We have completely lost our balance.

Rev. Ric Pitogo (Padre Excelente – I consider him) in his homily on a Sunday Mass, touched a little bit on ecological imbalance which, to me, is another one grave result of our exercise of the culture of death. Susan Muto, in her book LATE HAVE I LOVED THEE, stressed three (3) main keys to contentment and happiness which are to: Live Simply; Listen Attentively; and Love Respectfully.

In the book SEAT OF THE SOUL by Gary Zukav, he mentioned about man’s QUEST FOR POWER as the greatest disaster ever to plague the humankind. I believe that it is so. Look at the evidences. We are destroying/killing our planet by our inability or unwillingness to live simply anymore. We got spoiled by our modernization and technologies. We cannot listen attentively because most of the times our thoughts are preoccupied with other thoughts (na most of them are garbage naman. Sorry po!), or that we have not attained confidence yet (because we are either lazy or prideful nga to find out why).

Insecurity factor, sometimes manifested in superior attitudes, blunders effective communication. As a result, it is the more difficult for us to love respectfully because we have not known what really love is!

Looking at all these things more closely makes one want to give up, but we must not. We just probably have to internalize that the cultivation of the culture of love begins within us. That it is done by means of changing our heart and aligning our mind to it. It is called, by Thomas Moore (author of CARE FOR THE SOUL and SOULMATES: Honoring Love and Relationship), “incarnational theology”, which means “living Christ in us”.

Without proper alignment between our heart and mind, though, it is very impossible to live Christ in us. The thing is, other than this, we will simply learn and manifest the techniques and technicalities of saying and doing loving things, courtesy of our cultural dictates (social ethics) which made us hypocrites. This made me wonder how we differ, if at all, from those Pharisees of the olden times.

If, despite the impossibility of it, one day somebody gives me a blue rose in reality, in this lifetime, he/she must have then meant what I exactly mean. “Fat chance, sweetie!”, I must remind me to wake me up and stop dreaming.

But the greatest…is love…for without it “everything we say will be an empty sound” (Leo J. Trese, WISDOM SHALL ENTER)… and everything we do is but a mere action.

HAPPY HEARTS’ DAY EVERYONE! God be with us always.