Fidelity, commitment, freedom, love

I KNOW these are four big and stretchable words that can accept an endless series of related concepts and interpretations, including the right and wrong ones. Nowadays, this phenomenon is gaining strength and popularity. Many are the words people speak that are increasingly high-sounding but empty and hollow as well.

There’s a crying need now to clarify things, to pause and go slow if only to savor the many elements that go into these fat words and to get their proper contribution and blend. Hopefully, with this process our words can approach a more faithful description of reality, catching it and not chasing the wind.

As we are becoming more aware of today’s developments, our words seem to miss many things. Yes, we multiply them everyday, coin and mint new ones, infuse them with all sorts of nuances of meaning, and yet we are left with the sensation that we don’t understand each other that well or that we are really going nowhere.

Jargons, from the strictly technical to the jejemon, now dominate communication lines. We blurt out a lot of words, we conjure a lot of ideas and images. We seem to be creating languages of the flesh, of the world, of varied ideologies and fashions like newspeak, commercialism, sensationalism, etc.

Sure, we get something. But do we truly understand one another? Are we really connected with one another? Are we building up a better civilization of love and compassion, a culture of life and not of death?

I have the creeping suspicion that we are playing out the Tower-of-Babel syndrome. We seem to be bloated with our own powers, having produced already a tremendous amount of things, and we now dare to be on our own. The result is that we become more and more subjective, and less and less objective.

We are slowly removing ourselves from the foundation of reality, because we are distancing ourselves from God and relying more on ourselves. This is a tragic disconnect. That’s why we seem to be making own world, our own criteria, our own goals. Instead of a common reality, we are fragmenting it according to our own designs.

We are actually sowing the seeds of discord and conflict. We seem to be communicating with our new technologies, but the content remains impregnated with egoism, selfishness, utter worldliness.

We communicate but we seem to raise more walls among ourselves. The system of linkages has grown, bur ironically we cannot deny the surge of indifference, confusion and studied ignorance of the basic truths about ourselves.

Some people, like Pope Benedict, call this phenomenon, relativism. Everything is relative. Nothing is held absolute. We are entering into an absurd world, and we seem to be happy with it. What seems to be the driving force of our life today is self-interest, in its bold and naked state.

Give it a few more years and it would not be difficult to predict that that relativism will turn to anarchism. It will not just be the economy that will have a meltdown, nor the political world that will have its turmoils.

The civilization of the whole world now faces the threat of decadence and downfall. We are now witnessing sparks of this process in many places. Respect for life, for marriage and family life, for fidelity and commitment, is ebbing away.

Even on the Facebook pages of people, many are those who say under Relationship, It´s complicated. And I imagine that in that social network, people tend to put a nice image of themselves.

A return to God is now most urgently needed. Such return can only happen if it is driven by real love, the love of God himself for us and not just any version of love, like mere philanthropy and humanitarianism. It’s love based on truth as revealed to us in its fullness in Christ and effected in the Holy Spirit.

Alas, these things sound Greek to many, even to so-called Christians. There´s a need for radical, thorough catechesis of basic doctrine of our Christian faith, because even in that level, let alone putting things into life, many are failing.

That´s why they don´t see the connection between love, freedom, commitment and fidelity. If ever they are cited, they are most likely used to impress others, but I´m afraid in most cases they are emptied of their real substance.

The requirements of commitment and fidelity are precisely the strong manifestations of love and freedom. Many miss this equation. And so they easily fall victim to the blind forces of the flesh and the world.