Hijacking love

WE, of course, have to give a special day for the celebration of
love, of human love with all its exquisite flavor of romance and
sweetness that only lovers can understand and experience. We just have
to make sure we don’t waste that precious love on mush and other worse
things.

    Now that we are in the love month of February with its high point of
Valentine’s Day, we should make it a point  to understand that love is
not just a human invention, a human initiative and affair, stuck in
the world of feelings and passions. It has a much greater and deeper
character that goes beyond emotions and time and space.

    Love is the very essence of man, since we are the very image and
likeness of God who, we are told, is love, “Deus caritas est.” As
such, love has to be understood more in its divine origin and end,
rather than in its purely human and temporal dynamics that can go in
any which way.

    It is when love is understood and lived as, first of all, a divine
initiative and pursued according to the law God has put into it, that
we avoid illusions, fantasies, and unnecessary self-inflicted
tragedies that truly deceive and degrade us. It would be a love with
true character, and not a wishy-washy type.

    If only the true face of love is shown to us as early as possible and
the deviations identified and corrected promptly, I believe we would
have a much better world! Obviously, that ideal has to contend with
the realities of our human condition, mired as it is with human
frailties, ignorance, confusion, error, sin and malice.

    But given the new technologies and the progress in articulating the
truth about love, over and above the traditional means of doctrine,
sacraments, and other spiritual and human means, there should be less
problem in reaching that ideal.

    The difficulty, I imagine, is that the general world culture has not
yet found the connection between the theological love of God and the
human, passion-flesh-and- blood love that people experience and pursue
in their daily ordinary lives.

    This love of God is still widely deemed foreign to the day-to-day
love affair people have. It’s still considered abstract, if not
irrelevant. They cannot see the connection, for example, between that
love and the romance and sex associated with human love. They don’t
know how that love plays in their concrete love affair.

    It’s a pity, because the love of God actually covers the whole range
of human love, including the romance and sex parts, and goes beyond
it, elevating it to where it truly belongs.

    The love of God, the source, pattern and summit of human love,
purifies and expands human love that tends to be self-centered and
enmeshed with all forms of impurities. The love of God can make human
love soar to eternity, without annulling the humanness of human love.

    While there is now a growing literature about the Christian concept
of human love, this has not reached yet the media and the other
outlets where people can have easy access.

    What one usually sees in these outlets are caricatures and outright
distortions of love, entangled in the grip of frivolity, triviality,
commercialism, sex, pornography, etc. We need to have more Christian
presence in these circles insofar as human love is concerned.

    The more challenging task is how to bridge natural aspects of human
love with its supernatural goal, how to link prayer with human
sexuality, how to put human love in the context of the sacraments,
especially the Holy Eucharist.

    A lot of theologizing has to be done yet in this department. And the
first problem is that many people still need to be convinced that all
of us actually need to develop a theological mind, that is, allowing
our reason and, yes, even our senses, to be infused and guided by the
light of faith.

    The task of evangelization would not be complete without touching
this important area of human love. While it’s true that due to the
delicate character of this topic it has to dealt with a lot of
prudence and discretion, it’s also true that this issue has to be
aired out and ventilated widely. We need to find a way to do this.

    Let’s hope that the media and the social networks that help. They
actually can do a lot in enriching our culture that would include a
healthy and Christian attitude toward human love and everything
involved in it.

Is fidelity possible?

NOT only is it possible. Fidelity and its ally, the sense of
commitment, are also very practicable. First of all, it’s because
that’s the will of God. Second, because he has endowed us with the
power to be faithful and committed.

God wired us for them. We have been given the spiritual faculties of
intelligence and will that allow us to love and to enter into
commitments in spite of changing situations and the vagaries and
imponderables of life. Not only that. God always gives us the grace
that converts our power to be faithful and committed into reality.

We should quit asking that question, for it really has no basis,
unless we ourselves give it basis.

There’s the rub. Fidelity and the sense of commitment are not so much
of our own making as they are first of all a gift from God that we
ought to receive with gratitude and protect and develop.

As such, we need to earnestly and constantly ask, even beg God, so
that these gifts be given to us abundantly and that they stay with us
and grow to full maturity. God is always faithful. He cannot go
against his will and word, unlike us who can violate our own will and
word many times.

Psalm 145 says something pertinent: “The Lord is faithful in all his
words / and loving in all his deeds.” We should not forget these words
of Scripture.

Our usual problem in this regard is that we think we can be faithful
and committed simply by our own selves, by our own strength, or by
some collective human means and power. We need to correct this basic
misconception.

Especially these days when we enjoy our new technologies and the new
frontiers in the sciences and arts with their consequences of growth
in power and wealth, we can easily be deluded into thinking that our
fidelity can depend simply on our own making. We can forget God, or we
go to him only when we find ourselves helpless.

Everyday, we need to ask God for the strength to live our life and all
its challenges as we should. While God has endowed us with the power
to be faithful and committed, that power cannot be actualized unless
it is stirred by God’s grace.

We need to go to him. And for sure, we are bound to experience what
St. Paul once said: “I know both how to be brought low and I know how
to abound, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to
suffer need. I can do all these things in him who strengthens me.”
(Phil 4,12-13)

God is never sparing in sharing with us what he has. He even sent his
only Son to us, the Son assuming our human nature as well as the
consequences of our sin without committing any sin, just so we can be
back with him, in whose image and likeness we are.

Might be good to reflect on these words of St. Paul: “He that spared
not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how has he not
also, with him given us all things?” This argument should debunk any
suspicion that our belief in God’s sharing with us what he has is
gratuitous.

So we need to balance our personal experiences of frailty, mistakes,
falls, sin and their usual companions of guilt feelings, helplessness,
discouragement and even despair with this beautiful and undeniable
truth that God lends us what he has. We have to learn to choose the
options properly, since we can choose to fall into despair with our
own selves, or to rise above the mess by adhering to God.

Yes, we can truly be faithful and committed, even if our fidelity and
commitment would have their ups and downs. God will never fail us
unless we choose to fail him. So in the face of many trials and
challenges in one’s marriage or other commitments, we should be with
God always—from beginning to end.

We have to enrich our fidelity and sense of commitment by putting God
in the midst of them. There is no other way to attain the goal. We are
bound to stray and fail into infidelity if God is not made the prime
mover of our commitments.

Thus, we have to overcome the secularized or paganized attitude that
seems to spread in our society. Recourse to God should be a living
part of our culture insofar as fidelity and commitment are concerned.

Internet freedom and responsibility

I HAVE come to believe, each time more strongly, that the more freedom
one has, the more responsibility he should also exercise. The two
cannot and should not be separated.

Freedom is such a tremendous gift that it gives us power to be
anything or anywhere we want to be, including to be in the gutter—or
worse, in hell. That’s why, it has to be directed and conformed to a
law that is meant to be good for all of us.

That’s not a limitation of freedom. That actually enhances freedom,
since that makes freedom to get engaged with its proper purpose.
That’s when freedom would truly serve us for our own good and the good
of everyone else. And that good is none other than ultimately to love
God and others in the truth.

The Internet, especially its very popular social networking services,
has opened a wide, new and apparently endless and borderless avenue
for us to exercise our freedom of expression. It has brought about a
quantum leap of benefits and advantages unknown before.

In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the digital social networks are
creating “a new ‘agora,’ an open public square in which people share
ideas, information and opinions, and in which new relationships and
forms of community can come into being.”

He went to the extent of saying that the spaces created by this new
technology, if properly handled, can make the exchange of information
into true communication, the links can ripen into friendship, and
connections can facilitate communion.

That’s why, according to the Pope, all those who make use of them must
exert great effort to be “authentic since, it is not only ideas and
information that are shared, but ultimately our very selves.”

That’s a statement worth meditating on, if only to make into a strong
conviction the truth that in any communication, it is not merely ideas
that are exchanged, but ultimately a person-to-person
interrelationship is taking place.

Great care therefore has to be done. And it should be made clear that
in these exchanges, it is not only about who makes sense or more sense
that matters, but rather the ultimate goal and requirements of charity
have to be reached and met.

We need to examine ourselves more deeply if we are using the Internet
and its social network services properly. While it’s true that these
technologies can be used to further facilitate our ordinary
communications, we also need to make sure that they are not used to
foster inanities, vanities, waste of time, obsessions or worse, to
commit big sins and crimes.

Nowadays, pornography is a common stuff in this environment. Also
phishing and trolling. And all sorts of fraud and forms of indignities
are committed.

We definitely need to check ourselves frequently to see if our use of
these powerful means is on the right track toward our proper goal, if
we truly are facilitating authentic communication, if we are all
becoming better persons, understanding and loving each other more,
aside from understanding issues more deeply, etc.

The digital world should improve our capacity for tolerance to an
ever-increasing range of diversity, but it should also sharpen our
love for one another and our understanding and appreciation of
opinions as well as absolute truths.

These should be the standard and criteria to assess the quality of our
use of these means. We cannot remain cavalier in this regard, because
these new technologies, while giving us great good, can also cause big
and even almost irreparable damage to us.

We also need to understand that there has to be an effort to use these
technologies for the ultimate purpose of communication. And that is
evangelization, spreading the Good News about God and ourselves with
respect to our ultimate end.

The Pope spells this out quite clearly. “The challenge facing social
networks is how to be truly inclusive,” he said. That means these
networks should include God and should be open to all.

Otherwise, these powerful means can be likened to the Tower of Babel
that was built for the purpose of reaching heaven merely by human
effort. God destroyed it and made it to cause such confusion of
languages that the people could not understand one another anymore.

We need to be most responsible in enjoying the tremendous freedom
afforded by the Internet and its very popular social networks. When we
use them, are we clearly driven by love for God and for the common
good, or are we just allowing our merely human and temporal impulses
free play?