love3 February 13, 2012

love³

“How do I love thee, let me count the ways…” “Better to have loved and lost…” “I am my beloveds, and my beloved is mine.” ”She walks in beauty like the night…”  To presume to pen any original inspiration on the issue of love is, at a profound level, most audacious; at a fool-hearty level it is at least impudent.  Not to write at all is to relinquish earnest passion and attentive consideration to the past. I, for one, am not disposed to do that just yet. For love has roused anew in our progeny from ancient times and will do so long after we have crossed that sacred line of our lives.

Though there are endless examples of verse, song, physical expression, psychological and/or chemical analysis of love, it remains one of the rare universals that bind our race together. Nations have gone to war for the love of a woman; they have also gone to war over betrayal of love. One world renowned counselor/educator, Dr. Gary Chapman has even identified The 5 Love Languages.

Affirmation through Words

Acts of Service

Personal Touch

Receiving Gifts

Quality Time

[You can decide where taking-out-the-trash, changing-juicy-poopy-diapers, and cleaning-the-cat-litter-box go.]

There are at least three shapes of love that must be woven together for any kind of love to remain stable— love³, or, love cubed.

1.      Feeling— Being drawn to the other; whether by a boy, a girl, a car, a dress, a beautiful island, or a life purpose. Your heart is stirred, your passions aroused, and feelings stirred.

2.      Action— Whatever the object of your affection, you want to do something to show your love. If between a man & a woman, flowers and dinner; something to demonstrate your interest in them as a person. If a car, wax it, detail it— to the polishing of the wheel-wells. To aspire to achieve your life’s purpose is to focus your energies (& actions) toward that end. This is genuine love— feeling in action!

3.      Commitment— But Feeling & Action are not enough. There must be Commitment for the first two to stand the tests of time. You must ask yourself, How committed are you to this person? For better or for worse, in sickness & in health, ‘till death do us part? How long will I hang on to this old clunker? How serious am I about achieving my goals and making a difference in this world?

There is a short poem in the Hebrew Psalms (15) that asks a question— Who may stand on God’s Holy Hill, in His Temple, before His face? One of the answers it gives is, He who swears to his own hurt and does not change. He keeps his word and follows through. Good advice for any lover these days, eh!?!  Love³.

Have a nice week,

Gary

temporal distortion January 17, 2012

Salvadore Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory challenges us to reconsider the solidity of time. Dali saw time as “soft” vs something that is “hard.” Einstein postulated that time would slow down as a traveler reached the speed of light. This is a type of temporal distortion. So although the velocity of light is a constant, the measurement of time becomes a variable. It distorts.

In a sense, the faster humans go, the more our sense of time distorts. We try to pack so much into a day, a week, month or year, until we confuse the value of the time we have. We begin to live in separate “universes,” crossing between them as needed, to keep pace with ourselves and the impossible schedules we attempt to keep. The result is that we lose the ability to properly perceive ourselves in the real universe: we also lose our ability to perceive the real universe accurately as well. Our vision becomes skewed proportionately with the velocity of our lives. More simply— run ahead of reality, miss the small stuff. Critical details are not so designated capriciously. They are important to grasp in the grand scheme of things.

Our personal, temporal velocity will distort our grasp of real reality.

Time is measured out to each of us to use with delicate touch. None of us know how much of it we have in this life-span. So, in an effort to prevent a distortion of it, I offer these challenges to you—

In broad strokes, chart the next year; vacations, holidays, work commitments, family times. Do the same in more detail for the next month, for this upcoming week. Then ask these questions of yourself—

1. What is important to you? What % of time does that get?
2. What is the balance of time between work and family? Remember, it’s quality and quantity time.
3. How long does it take you to STOP? [You do stop, don’t you?] Relaxing cradles refreshment within.
4. How much time do you spend staring at the ceiling when you go to bed at night? Get help. OR, just STOP your day one hour earlier. One hour earlier. “Sleep…, don’t leave home without it.”

Do not be deceived. Temporal Distortion does lead to warped comprehension in adjacent areas of life. Given enough time distortion evolves into perversion; and perversion lapses into blindness to the truth of any reality other than the one solely inhabited by you. God set up this universe to run smoothly according to His principles of time & space, of relationships within reality. Don’t mess with it. Adjust your life to run in time with the Universal Clock; and I don’t mean the one in Greenwich.

Have a nice week,

Gary

holy January 10, 2012

Holy cow! Holy mackerel! Holy Father. Holy Toledo! Holy moly! Holy @#%$! Holy Spirit. Holy Bible. Holy ground. Holy terror (usually reserved for toddlers). Holy Grail. Holy Qur’an. Holy rollers. Holy Sutras.

Holy. The word is sprinkled throughout our vocabulary. In different forms it is found in most of the world’s languages. It appeared first in ancient Semitic form as Q-D-Š  (–), to designate something set aside for sacred use. The Hebrew qudosh (קֹדֶשׁ) was used in reference to holiness. In modern English we have a remnant of the original QDŠ through the Greek in the form of kudos. Yes, kudos, from an ancient Semitic root.

But what does holy mean? What does it look like? Looking within ourselves we can see that which is not holy, not good, not right. Yea, verily, many of us are certainly good; but holy? Not likely. Examining human history grants us further illustrations of that which is not holy. Ask any parent and they will inform you about their two year old from hell. Ask any parent of a teenager about half-truths, deception, secrecy, and “attitude.” Or sit in on a session of Congress, or a corporate “merger,” or international negotiation to avert a crisis. Holy would not be the first descriptor that would come to mind. On a deeper level, humanity seems rife with a characteristic we all understand and perceive to be definitively e-v-i-l. And evil needs no definition (the Plague, Vlad the Impaler, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, transAfrican genocide & starvation; whether we believe it to be of human or spiritual origin, there is little doubt in the human history, and within the human psyche, these individuals and events were (are) truly evil. The opposite of all that would be considered holy, in both nature and effect.

So how do we comprehend the holy? How do we even begin to define it? It is not evil: it is untainted, pure, safe, and complete unto itself. Through our world’s religions we can look at various definitions and interpretations of holiness, but can we ever really examine something that appears to be completely outside our realm of experience? Whatever it is, it is something totally other than what is normally familiar to us.

Or is it?

Is there, imbedded deep within our innate human consciousness, a sense, a knowledge, of that which we call holy? How is it that we possess a sense of reverence for holy things, holy places across the globe? Why do we consider certain practices or rituals holy? At one time or another we have all known fleeting glimpses of a holiness beyond ourselves which we intrinsically recognize within our souls. How can this be?

Allow me to suggest that there is within us all a holy presence who is intimately familiar with us, who seeks us, and desires that we seek him as well. Do not shy away from this quiet voice within. It just may be He who offers you a way beyond the rest of the evil we bear, and which we encounter each and every day of our lives. Maybe it is time we thought of holiness as more of a foundation, offered us as a basis for our lives than as an eventual reward for being good.

Have a nice week,

Gary

courage December 14, 2011

Socrates, Chin, Hammurabi, Abram, Moses, David, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Eric the Great, Charlemagne, Odo the Great, Elizabeth I, Peter the Great, Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Annie Sullivan, Mother Teresa, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Sgt. Dakota Meyer. Every one of these individuals possesses a quality every person on earth must acquire— courage. In our present era we talk more about our rights than about our responsibilities; we are more concerned about bottom-lines than life-lines for others. We have become more a people of self-preservation than of self-sacrifice.

Self-protection and self-gratification are not, mind you, the definers of all of us; certainly not of those in the opening inventory. There are still some who put others before themselves. Why do they do this? They possess qualities that others deem weaknesses, or foolish. Qualities like, graciousness, forgiveness, humility, and courage. These qualities are not often rewarded in the civic arena. In fact, they go mostly unnoticed. Acts of kindness & courage are most often done in secret; actions which come to light only at a later date (if at all).

Amidst the stresses swirling about in our postModern/postChristian society it takes courage for many of us just to get out of bed to face another day. Things are not as simple as they once were. The smorgasbord of choices and decisions we must make every day— what to do with our time & priorities, our commitments, our financial restrictions, our emotional highs & lows, our energies & exhaustion, notwithstanding the ethical & moral dilemmas we encounter, are overwhelming.

Unless we each hold some guiding principles, some basic beliefs about life, faith, and trust in something (Someone) beyond ourselves, we will be quite confounded as to how to grapple with it all. You see, courage rests on a foundation of belief, which rests on a certain realties beyond individual mere self-preservation. Call it faith in God, belief in a “higher-power,” or even a “…if it is God’s will.” Courage rarely issues forth from a basis of superiority; rather, it arises from a sense of one’s own humility in the grand scheme of things, in believing that there are powerful forces at work in our world, that there is a greater plan in place, than my own puny little existence.

In the ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi, inscribed above the forecourt was the Socratic maxim— γνῶθι σεαυτόν. “Know thyself.” We would all do well to take a measure of ourselves within, before our fellow man (and women), and before the God who made us. For it is only from a true knowledge of who we truly are that true courage can take root and be called upon when the time is at hand.

Have a nice week,

Gary