For Christians, love is the primary value, but only when that love comes with understanding. Love, isolated, is useless to us, destructive to society.
Mainstream Christians blab a lot about love, but you can tell they understand love to be just an emotion. Their love takes place against a background of materialism, a lifeless universe of randomness and physics...
But a real understanding of love is that love is bound up with creation, love is God's motivation for creation, is the 'organizing principle' of creation: love is the cohesion and purpose of all that has meaning.
Christians, of all people, must not mutilate love into a physical emotion restricted to functional animals during mortal life; or some deadly reduction of love to instinct, sex, or dependency. These are demonic strategies of damnation; their ubiquity among Christian leaders is evidence of the depth and breadth of our corruption.
Love is not encapsulated. Love connects us as individuals to the reason for creation, to consciousness, to our free agency.
Love is also the route to all good futures. It must underpin all free and creative thinking, all right choices, all positive ideas, actions and policies.
We are bound to creation by love, but love is only good when truly understood and when chosen as our fundamental basis.
Therefore, we should not parrot love-discourse, without also understanding love in the largest, most metaphysical sense.
Or else love will become an instrument of destruction.
This is apt. I've heard this point about love expressed as confusing love with sentimentality; "niceness" (not to speak of the glorification of sexual lust as love). Though, I feel there's a meaningful distinction between the destruction of damnation and the other sort of destruction which is inseparable from creation itself. That is to say: God is at once the all-loving, supreme, creating spirit and the great death. It speaks, in a way, to the way that Tolkien calls the death of Men a "gift" to them which the elves do not receive.
ReplyDelete@ Michael Yes, death is the only gateway to eternal life; yet a tragic severance too.
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