Practicing Love

You have to be firmly grounded in yourself, you have to stand bravely on your own two feet to be able to love at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche
***********************
Yesterday I had an amusing thought. Well, not so amusing, but ironic. The only way we will have peace in the world is if we eliminate all the people. Seriously, if it weren't for the gross, rotten behavior of the miscreants in the world we might actually survive. But then we are all guilty of bad behavior to one degree or another. So why don't we just vacate the place and leave it to the birds and bugs?

I have heard so-called pious, devout Christians say they were very religious and hence believed in "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Moses put that law into effect in order to prevent exactly what goes on these days, the escalating violence of revenge. "If you hurt my goat, I'll kill your cow to 'teach you a lesson,' then if you set fire to my barn to retaliate I'll destroy your house and every one in it" and so on until someone drops the big one and we all perish. Fortunately Jesus set aside that old law and replaced it with one about loving your enemies. It takes courage to do that instead of "getting even," "settling the score," "closure."

The Bible says "God is love." That's an equation with two unknowns, x = y, with neither x nor y concretely defined. Some of those same eye-for-an-eye Christians will say that God sends a hurricane to punish us for our sins and He visits a disease on us to test our faith. Who wants to worship a god like that, a god of disaster and disease? That so-called god is no better than the barn burner.

If God is love then practicing love is the best form of worship, and that means not only loving and forgiving your enemies but loving even the skunks and vipers of the human race. And when disaster strikes to go and help and save and not wait for God to send rain on the fire. "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven" Shakespeare wrote.

I can't define love. I stand humbly in the shadow of great philosophers, poets and song writers who have been trying to do that for centuries. But it seems to me that one who truly loves is like a sturdy oak in a tempest, an oasis in a desert, a hug in someone's sorrow and a cheer in their joy.

DB - The Vagabond
**********************
AUTUMN QUESTION

(This is not a contest.)

At what event of the past do you wish you could be present? Why?

Only 9 responses so far.

dbdacoba@aol.com

Thank you.
DB
************************