"Be" love. For we must.

Sparkplug

Love has a hem to her garment that reaches to the very dust. It sweeps the stains from the streets and lanes, and because it can, it must.

~Mother Teresa

I used to know somebody who was in her order/convent. Seems that Mother Theresa was deliberately surrounding herself with people of the same caliber and quality, i.e. full of unspoiled love and compassion. A lesson to think about ...

Two of her other quotes I like...

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

littlerockguy

I read this on a blog online the other day and it is something I have to remind myself and keep in mind since it is so true.

"Something changed. It's the inability to be vulnerable... We have this great fear of being dependent... The inability to be vulnerable is the problem: it's the depth personality not the surface personality that has to fall in love."
...
Love requires vulnerability. Love is not a luxury. Love is a need. Love leads you to becoming dependent, not co-dependent, but needing someone in a way that feels uncomfortable according to our cultural standards. [note: even using the word dependent here seems strange - it's a word that seems more appropriate for tax returns than marriage, but perhaps that is my own bias. What word best expresses that deep bond?]
...
When we give of ourselves in an intimate way with another person, whether physical, emotional or spiritual, a bond is formed. I believe we can separate the physical from the other aspects of ourselves. Or at least we think we can. Love and sex divorce. We can seem to separate our bodies from our souls. Yet no matter what we do with our outsides, invisible imprints are left inside us.

Sparkplug

Zagor, what an interesting person to know. I see you took note by the example of the surround yourself with such like...

cont.,

"I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love."

" If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

Sparkplug

Robert, I read the same. "Yet no matter what we do with our outsides, invisible imprints are left inside us." Quite true.

It reminds me that even by a persons absence we are changed. Kind of like children are changed by the absence of a parent. So too the absence of a (romantic) loved one changes us because of the imprints that are left within us by person of said absence.

zagor

" If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

How true ...

Just have to quote few more

"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."

" "The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted."

"We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do."

Sparkplug

"The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted."

I am reading Reviving Ophelia. How odd that part of the theme seems to be "that" feeling. I am just starting and it appears as if the author is going to use some info from Dr. Simone de Beauvoir pertaining to the aspects of our society and culture that tend to change the adolescent girl and make her feel so out of place, thus beginning the crushing of her spirit.

This book is said to be pretty good as to some insight as to some of the causes and some prevention that can be done to help the individual girl keep her own interest in life and keep her inquisitiveness and not fall into that pattern of being an object or a diseased unwanted thing in her own perception of herself.

Anhow I am running on...idle and usless prattle, er, cacophony...yeah. Thats it.

zagor

Just read reviews of Reviving Ophelia on Amazon and Dr Mary Pipher's own summery of the book on http://www.mediaed.org/handouts/pdfs/OPHELIA.pdf

I particularly loved this paragraph
“In order to keep their true selves and grow into healthy adults, girls need love from family and friends, meaningful work, respect, challenges and physical and psychological safety. They need identities based on talents and interests rather than appearance, popularity or sexuality. They need quiet places and times. They need to feel that they are part of something larger than their own lives and that they are emotionally connected to a whole.”

I agree with Dr Pipher on just about everything I read so far. I don't think there was ever a period where so much pressure was put on young ones, girls in particular, to conform. All the media imagery and iconography is about promoting highly sexualized and unnatural image of a "modern woman" (whatever that is)
Coolness factor is measured in outside characteristics which effectively forces girls into wrapping themselves into culturally imposed set of "values". Unfortunately, it is hard at such young age for them to see that those values are nothing but cleverly devised marketing ploys whose only objective is to turn them into label seeking slaves who cant find their own identity and hence need likes of Gucci, Levi Strauss, Gap, Lacostte and others to do it for them.

Of course that is just one side of the problem. Commercialization of our culture also meant departing from things that really count in life so by the time many of, I would say both girls and boys, start understanding what is really happening many had already been through series of small disasters.

Just the other day I was driving and flipping trough radio channels and came to teen radio station... One thing that stuck in my mind was conversation between a couple in studio with a girl that phoned in about going to "cool" places and among other things said was also this "don't go to a freakin library" (repeated at least couple of times that I remember)
If I phoned manager of the station to complain about it usual response would be that they are giving their audiences what audiences want. Which is really a bull, they "want" those things because they are bing reinforced and conditioned through our popular culture as "cool". Problem is of course that no one sees a problem in that and everyone washes their hands while passing a bucket onto someone else, school, parents, government, society....

In any case I'm glad you mentioned the book, I'll get a copy and read it. What we need in society is many voices like Mary Pipher only then things will start changing.

Crumpet

Wow! Really interesting thread sparky and some really deep thought has come through in the responses.

Love requires vulnerability. Love is not a luxury. Love is a need. Love leads you to becoming dependent, not co-dependent, but needing someone in a way that feels uncomfortable according to our cultural standards. [note: even using the word dependent here seems strange - it's a word that seems more appropriate for tax returns than marriage, but perhaps that is my own bias. What word best expresses that deep bond?]

I really liked this which LRG posted. I think that is the bare bones of love. I think my fear of vulnerability probably outweighs my need to be loved.

Mother Theresa's thoughts are poetry. I was annoyed that when she died people were far more interested in making a fuss about Princess Diana than this great woman!

DJK

You ask me if I've known love
And what it's like to sing songs in the rain
Well, I've seen love come
And I've seen it shot down
I've seen it die in vain

Some of us aren't so blessed I guess.

"Be" love. For we must.

Share this