Monday 20 February 2012

What is Love?

Our society is confused as to what love is. There is a sickness in our society. Pope John Paul II's  1994 "Letter to Families" examines this sickness in our society. The sickness consists in the almost total loss of the marks of a "civilization of love," which is how the Pope characterizes a civilization that is truly human. We are living instead, he says, in "a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of 'things' and not of 'persons,' a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used" In society and in man, something is seriously wrong.


This loss of love is what is crippling our society. True human health can only be present in persons who are able to love; and we are forgetting how to love, forgetting perhaps most of all that we have to love. We love God by loving those around us.


We know that the natural way for love to develop is in the family. We know that children raised without love do not develop properly, they even die. This has been seen in experiments done in orphanages and in the example of the Dionne Quintuplets who were taken from their parents at birth, growing up not able to love properly.


God instituted the family to be the first place where love is naturally learned and from which it can spread out to others. God chose to be born into a family, with a mother and a father, a man and a woman, to give us an example.


God sends love into the world through marriage and the family. Whether life turns out to be good or bad, positive or negative, depends on the family. Family quality and family experience are vital if we are to have healthy individuals and a healthy society where, despite the presence of evil, good is even more strongly present. As the Pope's Letter to Families states: "the family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.


By examining God's plan further, we can say that the family has such strength because it is that special place where no one is unloved, not even the most unlovable. Parents tend to love their children, even the worst. In the family children learn that there is a love which is not conditioned on merit or withdrawn because of defects. Children who have experienced being unconditionally loved, are in a good position to measure up to the challenges of love, inside and outside the family. If children do learn to love, it is because they have experienced it within the natural setting of the family.


But not all families are schools of love. True love is demanding and involves self-sacrifice. Self-seeking is not compatible with true love, which is a call to come out of self: to give, not to seek self. Love therefore is a challenge; it is never an easy option. "Love is demanding," the Pope says, and goes on: "Nowadays people need to rediscover this demanding love, for it is the truly firm foundation of the family" Love and happiness are demanding. Happiness is the consequence of dedication and self-forgetfulness. We must always keep in mind an old saying that there are 4 rings in marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, the suffering, and the enduring.


The quality of love in the family increases in proportion to the degree of self surrender on the parts of the parents. Couples have to decide once and for all that they have to become canonizable saints. Only in families like these will good be stronger than evil in today's society.

Not just hidden saints that nobody knows about but canonizable saints.


Thus we read in the Letter to Families "Love is not a utopia: it is given to mankind as a task to be carried out with the help of divine grace". The Holy Father speaks of "the dangers faced by love," and adds: "Here one thinks first of all of selfishness." How true this is. All of us are made for love; and yet all are dogged by selfishness. Hence comes the constant struggle of life.


Parents must develop patience in listening, understanding and be open to the opinion of others, and learn the gentle way to teach.

  1. Be involved in parent support groups, clubs, camps, activities where children meet children of families of same values.


  1. Have house rules. Read Jim Stenson's "Lifeline" or Gary Smalley's "Key to your child's heart," or Focus on the families game" House Rules". Have these established from a young age and enforce them. 5 or 6 simple rules that encompass everything


  1. Limit Media exposure, watch it with them. Teach them to evaluate programs and music. Good music, Good message. Bad Music Good Message, Good music Bad message, Bad Music Bad Message. Be an example not a hypocrite.


  1. Develop a friendship with your adolescent. Tell them all you want them to know by 11 years old and then step back to watch them live it


  1. Use tough love. Limit money, Life piles, let them be responsible for their actions. Teach responsibility using natural consequences.


  1. Use proper communication techniques, I versus You statements, Don't lecture, Keep Quiet, teach by example.


Marriage is a divine way. For example, if baby cries at 3 AM, if the Mother or Father intends to take care of it as part of God's plan, then this time can be called a holy hour. A religious getting up at the same hour knows he/she can go back to bed in 60 minutes - with baby , it is quite uncertain. We sanctify ourselves through learning to serve others and this is true love.


The greatest enemy of love is pride and selfishness. If pride and selfishness are not fought, they destroy love, unity and happiness, and place the soul in eternal danger. Humility is one of the essential weapons for the fight: the humility of constantly asking pardon of God for one's personal sins; and in married life of asking one's partner for forgiveness- even if one thinks he or she is mainly to blame.


Holiness is the only formula to solve the real crises of this world. We must establish priorities. First God, then family, than community, then self. An interior life, then family life is more important than material goods. Reading the 7 Habits of Effective Lives is a good book to read to help get on a path to setting priorities in our lives so we will have the time to develop a spiritual life. We need a spiritual director and order in our life to truly do God's will in this society.


Growth in one love is not possible without growth in the other. Married people, he repeated, "have been called by God to come to divine love also by means of human love." [14] "Married couples have a grace of state to live all of the human and Christian virtues which must characterize life lived close together: understanding, good humor, patience, the readiness to forgive, tactfulness in mutual dealings. The important thing is not to give up the effort to live those small virtues, not to let nerves or pride or personal manias get the better of them. For that, husband and wife need to grow in interior life, and to learn from the Holy Family to put great care into living the virtues characteristic of a Christian home; doing so out of a human and a supernatural motive at one and the same time." [15] Blessed Josemaria used often to say that "happiness has its roots in the shape of a Cross." [16] It is the rule and apparent paradox of the Gospel: only by "losing" and giving ourselves-the essence of love-can we begin to find ourselves and, even more than ourselves, find the happiness we are made for


It is not in Parliament, nor in Supreme Courts, nor in United Nations Conferences that love can be revived, but only in families. Married couples have to learn to put their own purely personal or individual concerns into the background; and, together, to overcome their mutual differences (or to discover how to live with them), to forgive and to forget, and to love each other, defects and all. If their love is wise and true, they will not want to remain just a couple; they will want to become a family. And then, as parents, they need constantly to raise their minds and hearts-each one individually, and both together-to what God is proposing to them; to what society and the world needs from them; and to what their children, have the right to expect from them. The Holy Father is calling us all to help in the re-Christianization of society and this depends on the effort and sacrifice we make in order to increase the number of truly Christian homes. The society is in need of families as healthy cells to regenerate those who live in darkness.

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