Prompt thought of the week:
Sometimes the things we think offer love actually seek to bind us, preventing us from being full and whole and offering our best love to the world. The story of Lazarus, whose funeral shrouds trail him out of the tomb, offer us a metaphor of new life as we recognize that true love is that which unbinds us, that wants for us more, not less, freedom and life. Jesus says to us, “Come out!” Walk! Live! Love! Shed your funeral clothes and offer your deepest self, your deepest love, for the world. Of course this kind of love can be dangerous, as we will see as the events of Holy Week loom closer. But the price of continuing to look for love in the wrong places is higher than the blessing of life lived boldly.
I recall a song entitled “Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places”. That’s about all I remember about it other than it was referring to romantic love. This week’s theme is “Look for the Liberator” and uses the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life as a metaphor for the new life that comes with the love of God. Loving God and feeling loved by God gives us the freedom to grow and flourish without undue worry about failing.
Back when we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary friends gave us a plaque with a definition of love. It is a bit convoluted in grammatical construction but it offers an interesting insight.
“Love is the passionate and abiding desire on the part of two people to produce together conditions under which each can be, and spontaneously express, his or her real self; to produce together an intellectual soil and an emotional climate in which each can flourish, far superior to what either could achieve alone.”
While this may have been referring to romantic loving couples, it is just as applicable to the love between friends, siblings, and parents and their children. Think about how children flourish when nurtured by loving parents. Or, think about how much better you felt after sharing a heavy concern of yours with a friend – or with God. Did a sibling ever tell you “I’ve got your back.”?
In today’s consumerist society, happiness seems to be defined as having everything “you deserve” and boy do you deserve a lot. We have lost the desire to have long term meaningful relationships with people to the desire for the short lived thrill of the acquisition of a new gadget. Even worse is the dramatic increase in the amount of bullying, misinformation, and hateful comments via social media.
The only antidote I see is to be firmly grounded through love of God, family, and friends. This allows us to be confident in ourselves and our unique capabilities in order to resist or ignore the incessant call to attain some impossible standard or to buy some unneeded gadget that we “deserve”. Take time to meditate about who you are and who you think you should be. Ask God who God thinks you should be. Then listen. Repeat as needed.
Bill Hanna