Tuesday 9 July 2013

TRUE LOVE PART 1

Love alone is the core of human desire.
—Sun Myung Moon
Contemporary life is fraught with ambiguity, pain and disappointment.
All people enter this world hoping for happiness as individuals,
fulfillment in their relationships with others, and a
meaningful and rewarding role in work and society. The path to
these life goals might rightly be called the “true way of life.” Yet
such a path—if it exists—is not easily found. Discerning it requires
lessons that are not taught in any school.
Schools may do a fair job of training young people in the knowledge
and skills needed for career success. Yet even a six-figure
income can be for naught for people who fail to form lasting relationships
and establish healthy families. Today’s youth approach
marriage and family life with high hopes of love and happiness
only to find themselves incapable of living in the harmony they
dream of. Pessimism about family relationships abounds, leading
many young people to expect that their lives will most likely follow
a pattern of “Marry. Divorce. Marry again.”
Similarly, modern life has left the natural human longing for
community in a shambles. Relations between neighbors are often
cold and distant. Few are willing, or even asked, to watch out for one
another’s family or property. “All we want is peace,” neighbors tell
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13
one another, yet they rarely take steps to foster genuine communities
of mutual help. Instead when there is a problem, citizens
blame one another, or blame politicians. Where there is a problem
at school, teachers blame parents and parents blame teachers.
Even in peaceful, prosperous, and well-functioning communities,
there is, or should be, the nagging awareness that not everyone
lives as well as they do. Can one community’s peace and happiness
be complete, knowing that others are suffering? A smug selfassurance
that others are simply not as meritorious, hard-working,
or deserving drowns out the voice of the conscience, which calls
people to help the less fortunate.
On the national level, partisanship divides national policy;
racism abounds, corruption festers, and issues seem unsolvable.
Nations act in their own self-interest rather than in the interests of
the world community. Quarrels between nations can escalate into
a cycle of revenge-retaliation-revenge, with each side claiming to be
evening up the score from the past. Even generous gifts of aid from
one nation to another frequently come with strings attached.
Humankind exists in disharmony with the environment; often
taking more than is given back, ruining delicate ecosystems, sacrificing
the long-term blessings that come with care and prudence
in favor of short-term profits. We are incapable of sharing equitably,
even with the natural systems that sustain us.
Where can we find answers to these problems? Can we find a
comprehensive approach that leads us to a true way of life, one
that generates positive results on every level? Philosophy and religion
have sought answers, but their answers have often created
more confusion. Political and educational programs have been instituted
in hopes of reform, only to flounder in the morass of halftruths
and superficial solutions that fail to touch the core of the
problem. In seeking objective truth, science has tried to dispel the
ignorance that pervades human life and makes it “nasty, brutish
and short.” While these efforts have helped the human situation
enormously, they are at their best when focused on narrow and
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14
precise goals—curing disease, generating energy or improving communications.
They still have not effectively addressed the root of the
problems that plague human existence.
The Longing for Love
There is a yearning—a hunger—that all human beings have
felt but few have satisfied. Men, women, and children experience
it. Writer John Steinbeck described it: “You are warm enough, but
you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved,
but your yearning wanders in new fields.”1 King Solomon wrote
how he built palaces and gardens and strove for learning and other
accomplishments to fill the howling void inside only to find that, in
the end, “this too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind”
(Ecclesiastes 2.11). The Buddha felt it too, when as a young prince
he could not find any gratification in the pleasures of the palace, and
so set off on a quest for enlightenment.
Satisfaction always seems just out of reach, just over the
horizon, coming tomorrow, or next year or the next, when the ship
comes in. People think they will at last find fulfillment “When I
win the lottery,” “When I get a raise,” “When she finally loves me,”
“When the new house is finished.” Yet even when these things
happen, the yearning remains in force. Happiness eludes one like
mercury slips away from the pursuing fingertips. The Qur’an
affirms, “The life of this world is but the comfort of illusion” (3.185).2
Augustine said that the human heart is restless for God, and
will always be so until finding rest in Him. A modern-day preacher
said, “There is a God-sized hole inside of us. No matter how many
steaks, electronics, liquor, drugs, entertainment and sex we pour
down it, only God can fill the hole.”
However, to many people God is an abstraction. Worse, He may
seem like a God of punishment with many rules and demands.
Worse still, people have done horrible things to one another in the
name of God, leading to division and hatred rather than unity and
belonging. Witness all the terrorist violence being done in the name
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15
of God; witness the Inquisition, the Crusades. Religious and denominational
loyalties tend to keep believers apart rather than bring
them together.
Furthermore, in the post-Freudian era, religious yearnings have
been looked at as pathologies, crutches, or self-delusion. Religion has
even been seen as a tool of capitalist or colonialist imperialism and
exploitation. Given all these caveats about religion, how, then, can
we say that God is the answer to the universal human longing?
The apostle John said, “God is love” (1 John 4.8). What people
actually want is behind God and inside of God. They want the
essence of God, which is love. People want to know and feel pure
and selfless love, and they want that love to pervade all their relationships
and their world. Such love is the key to feeling filled and
fulfilled. Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin said, “Love alone is
capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and
fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is
deepest in themselves.”3
Indeed, when people accomplish something, purchase something,
hope and dream about attaining something, what they are
really yearning for is to further their experience of love. In every
relationship, in every action and transaction, all day, every day,
people are seeking true love. The need is universal. It is found in all
people at all times and under all different circumstances. Mother
Teresa stated, “People throughout the world may look different or
have a different religion, education or position, but they are all the
same. . . . They are all hungry for love. The people you see in the
streets of Calcutta are hungry in body, but the people in London or
New York also have a hunger which must be satisfied. Every person
needs to be loved.”4
True love is so ultimately valued that it encompasses and
informs all other values. We may say it is the wellspring of value and
the standard of all value. So good, so satisfying, so ambrosial and fulfilling
is true love that Reverend Moon has said people are drawn to
it like bees to nectar. What is more, having tasted it, they will not let
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it go. He says, “If a bee is sucking the nectar from a flower, you can
try to pull him away; but instead of letting go, his body will tear in
half. He will never stop sucking the nectar.”5 Selfless love is that
delicious, that desperately desirable.
Lack of Love
Yet as much as we yearn for love, it eludes us. We find precious
little, and what little we find is rarely true. We can identify this
absence of true love as the root problem which colors human life
with its dark and ambiguous hues. For instance, in family relationships,
it can be terribly hard to give and to give in to one another.
Without love, it is well nigh impossible to stifle the blame-assigning
remark, to refrain from sowing the seeds of resentment by arbitrary
and insecure power-grabbing. Being able to see the other
person’s point of view, to listen and really understand when opinions
and interpretations differ is almost impossibly difficult when
love is absent.
Spouses look at one another in pain and puzzlement as to where
the love they had imagined for themselves could possibly have
gone. It often seems like they had more affection at the beginning
of their marriage than they do further along. The honeymoon is
over, and the fond feelings have been replaced by something that
more closely resembles contempt. Disillusioned by their parents’
failing love, teenagers react and seek love among their peers, sometimes
in destructive ways of which their parents disapprove. Given
these and other situations, most people look at their family relationships
with at least some ambivalence, guilt, and regrets.
Lack of love robs us of community among our neighbors and
frustrates our desire for peace in the world. Without the true love
that sees our neighbor’s children as just as deserving of our attention
and care as our own children, we stand idly by while they
make mischief and are even afraid to intervene for fear of offending
their parents.
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On the national level, patriotism can be beautiful and
ennobling; yet love of the nation above all others falls short of what
is required for peace. Nationalism is a form of self-love writ large,
which can take monstrous forms; Paul Tillich called it “a god who
certainly proves to be a demon.”6 Rare is the nation capable of giving
the balm of unselfish love that would make for lasting peace. To
resolve the conflicts that lead to war, terrorism, oppression of minorities
and ethnic violence, true love calls for sacrifice; yet rare are
the individuals who possess such love that they would put their
lives on the line to stand against the hatred.
Somehow, the pipeline of true love has been broken. Many religious
and cultural traditions would call it the “Fall of man”—the
entry of evil and sin into a once paradisiacal world where, according
to many traditions, man walked with God in oneness of heart.
However the origin of the problem is conceived of, it remains
unsolved. There is not enough love. And where it exists, it is rarely
true love.
The Centrality of Love
The desire for true love dominates 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.”7
Every cell within human beings responds to love, yearns for
love, and drives them to seek for love. The human face is meaningless
in isolation; it is meant to communicate with others in 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.”
Teilhard described love as a force, mysterious yet binding, even
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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.”8 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.”9 That “mysterious identity” is
true love. The yearning for unity with another and others—yearning
for oneness in love—is the glue that binds the universe together.
Love is thus the core of human striving and the raison d’etre of
the created world. Therefore, in searching for the comprehensive
principles that might delineate a true way of life, there is no better
place to begin than with the study of true love.
Love motivates sacrificial and virtuous acts of all sorts. Who
has not felt that he or she could give all—risk all—for the sake of true
love? It is what prompts a mother to run barefoot over glass to save
her child. It is what moves the older brother to say nobly to the
teacher, “It is my fault,” to take upon himself the punishment his
frightened younger brother has incurred.
Love is a healer. 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.
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.”10 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.11
Love is a sustainer. As Viktor Frankl recounted of his life in a
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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.12
Love makes life on earth worthwhile, and it presages life in
the next world as well. 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.” “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.”13
It is impossible to properly orient ourselves and educate our
children for the good life without giving priority to questions of
love. If we can understand this fundamental reality, this value of
values, we begin to gain a clear perspective with which to address
any issue of life. The breaching of distances, the resolution of opposites,
the dissolving of disparate complexities into an integrated
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whole—all this comes through true love and that alone. 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.