To love love

We accept the love we think we deserve. (Stephen Chbosky)

Our culture mischaracterized love in a way that it’s hardly recognized through its infinite false copies.

We replaced the Ancient and Medieval ideal type of the saint with its modern corresponding ideal type of philosopher and scientist and now we have the all glamorous postmodern versions of love lover/activist.

To love love is the total dementia of a language that lost its contact with reality. Love is now that domesticated virtue that by a simple invocation gives us the social acceptance to justify any vice.

1. We expect from love, but we do not respond first to it, recognizing its price and imperatives!

2. We demand other’s love, but we are not showing it when there is none!

3. We think that love is a magical mantra that will change things around, but we do not persevere and assume its cost when there are no signs of it.

4. We focus so much on quantifying love (numbers as substitute for quality and/or honesty and modesty), but we are not ready for that anthropological realism that not everyone will embrace love.

5. Our love for love is vocal, selfish and obsessed with its self glorification.

6. We impose our love to othersthrough censorship, exclusion, name-calling, scapegoating – a violent love in the name of love!

Love is just our life lived for another life, not because of our mortality, but despite of it.

Love knows its limits – even God wasted his infinite love for some humans who continuously choose to defy and reject His love! That’s why true, genuine love, is something not from this world. While we, finite and hypocritical, are tempted to impose our love in a totalitarian way, God’s love is infinite and still does not suffocate and limit other’s freedom!

We have to be taught and then asked to show this kind of love. This world is formidable deaf to love’s call while covering its weaknesses with slogans made out of love letters. While we, carnal humans, tend to think of love as a perfect ideal, for a spiritual God love is a painful choice of limiting itself!That’s why to love God and others is a command, not a romantic idealism!

Jesus Christ – abstract painting by Amal Augustine

Christ’s love is the only tested paradigm of what true love is. He’s embracing, but not forcing, waiting but keeping you accountable, sacrificial, but demanding.

Consider a simple test: if you really value love, not just signaling your moral superiority, take a look at how you treat those who have the opposite values and ideas. Accusing them of hate when disagree with them shows how insignificant and impotent your love is. You give love a bad name!

Love is still waiting to be understood, embraced and lived in our everyday acts, gestures, thoughts, words, silent moments… Love does not expect to be loved, but understood as something sacrificial and demanding… Because love is a Person, not an ideal to fight, suppress and silence others!