 |
| Maumee Bay State Park, Ohio |
Power is good. Love is better.
What our diseased world needs now is love.
Thomas Merton writes:
"Now I see more and more that there is only one realistic answer: Love. I have got to dare to love, and to bear the anxiety of self-questioning that love arouses in me, until “perfect love casts out fear.”" (Thomas Merton, Learning To Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton), Kindle Locations 857-858, April 25, 1966)
Love has attributes, which include:
- is patient
- is kind
- does not envy
- does not boast
- is not proud
- does not dishonor others
- is not self-seeking
- is not easily angered
- keeps no record of wrongs
- does not delight in evil
- rejoices with the truth
- always protects
- always trusts
- always hopes
- always perseveres
- never fails
Love sacrifices self for others. Jesus said "anyone who loves their life will lose it." (John 12:25) And: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13)
Love's reach is expansive. Jesus said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5:44) In this way love is power. With love things come together; with war things fall apart.
Love's primal, aboriginal subject is God. Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39)
"Love" is defined by the being of God. God is love, in essence.
Love makes no rational sense without God. Without God, if there is no God, love does not exist. Atheist physicist Stephen Weinberg acknowledges this (see Weinberg, "Without God"). Weinberg's scientism causes him to conclude: "The worldview of science is rather chilling... the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years." Weinberg is correct. If there is no God there is no "love," since all our emotions, to include "love," are but chemical processes in our physical brains.
Love looks like Jesus.
Love, God's love, is the only answer.
Pray for this, in you.
