True Love Has Nothing To Do With Selfishness
The Universe
(February 29, 2004)
TWO weeks ago, we had Valentine’s Day and the Philippine media made a big splash about the longest kissing session by the most number of people – more than 5,000. The true meaning of real love remained uncelebrated and not mentioned.
Young people are overwhelmed with sexual images in magazines and on television masquerading as true love. In reality, they are promoting pornography and promiscuity. Many young people are caught up in the emotions of physical attraction, which they mistake for love. The consequences are clear – fatherless children, rampant abortion, broken homes, failed marriages. That is because they focus solely on the erotic.
Young people need more than the sensual to carry them through life and the challenges of bringing up a family, earning a good living and growing old together in happiness and peace. Not easy these days.
What Valentine’s Day missed of course is the love that that transforms people from selfish to being fired up with ideals. Idealism is less easy to find these days, but it is there and many young people are willing to dedicate themselves to a good and just cause and many risk their lives working for justice.
It is love when the village folk stand with their priest to block the loggers and their armed guards to save the rain forests. Love is when the volunteers go out on a freezing night to gather up the homeless and bring them to food and shelter.
When the relief worker spends endless days in the refugee camp with the skeletons dying of the unspeakable hunger – that is love.
The unpaid doctors and nurses who risk their own lives in the raging gunfire of a civil war to save the wounded – that too is love.
In case you feel depressed with the blast of shameful selfishness that assails us from all corners, think of the unseen love that is everywhere. The countless acts of sacrifice of kind and simple people helping others every day, unsung and unknown to all but God.
It is not a thankless and cold bitter world without loving and caring people. There are millions of all faiths who love others.
Christians who follow in the footsteps of Jesus and stand with the downtrodden are making love present. In the poor and tortured, sick and abandoned, Jesus is present and in them we meet his sacred presence.
In them we are healed while we are reaching out to heal. God's transforming love is working in us when we are doing what he wants us to do, and he love as he loved us. That is what Valentine’s Day ought to celebrate because that is everlasting love.
