Jonny Heart: Love (Part 4)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Love (Part 4)

Nature, what to say about it? It is Beautiful and at other times terrifying, not terrifying in the sense I shiver with fear but a fear that stands in awe of a presence that compares you to a tiny blade of grass and itself the greatest of all mountains. The beauty molded into trees and rivers or the vast blue sky that protects us from a span greater then I may comprehend or pretend to. The great features are made up of all the little details like texture, creatures, colors, quantity, heat or cold. A friend once told me how she could see God in a swarm of gnats and it was beautiful, I do not have that talent, but desire it. This post will base more on reason then poetry.

The question brought up at sonic and I now inquire about is this; “Is it possible to Love nature?” Monokardia spat quickly back, “Yes!” Now I consider if that to be true. A man says he may love his dog, but the question of Love remains, does the object of affection have to return such a desire. The Dog lives off its master, like a baby relies on a parent. Can the baby love? It thinks only of itself and of course has to in order to survive. You could say that the dog feels love for the master, making it an emotional based love. The dog is happy when you return home, and wishes you to give it attention and pet him. Yet again the direction of attention is one way, from the master to the Dog and never in return. Now is that the love that a human has for another human, or on a higher level the love God has for man? The dog serves and does tricks, but for the satisfaction of praise and a treat. I am convinced now that if we keep love to a core value of an action of will serving another then no, a dog cannot love but has the appearance of love.

This only answers the question can nature love in return, not can man love nature?

My Grandfather gave me a boat shelf made out of cherry wood, a wonderful gift. Now, I could say I love those shelves, but is that true? Do I love them because of what it is or because of who gave them to me and the time and energy he put into it just for me? After considering it I found that the later was true. So when God gave us nature as a gift and made us stewards over it, does that mean we love nature because of what it is or because God gave it to us? Take this argument outside of Christianity; does an atheist love nature for the simple fact it is appealing to observe? I should say yes. Now does his idea of love match ours/mine? I should say not. I am not sure what I would say of nature if I were not a Christian, I have always been one so I have no way of knowing. I think they care as much, if not more of it then Christians. Could this mean then that it is possible to love nature though you do not acknowledge a divine creator? I should say no. A non-creator idealist still has faith that it is mere chance we exist. They put faith in evolution or something to that nature. Now it can be said of them they have respect for nature because they acknowledge the complexity of it but have not love for it (by our stricter sense of the word love). The point is that when you realize your own insignificance you gain a respect for what seems greater. When a Christian says he or she loves nature, what they mean is they love the gift God has given them. So they love God, not nature.

Well let us ponder on the idea of sharing love. A man and wife, in the truest sense, love one another by serving the other. This is the highest level of love; only fitting it comes in the worldly ideal, as the lowest notion of acts, serving. In the beginning of the first post I asked the question is it possible to love someone or something if they do not return the favor? Depends on the love. If you think of erotic love then no you cannot, it is a love you share. Now if you take agape love then yes, you could say that but a man who “loves” a girl though she does not love in return may actually be suffering from his own infatuation, which is not love but a envy or lust. Is it possible for a man or woman to love a person as a husband should love a wife or vice versa yet the recipient denies such affection? To that I am still searching for an answer. So I suppose the discussion of love comes down to matter of diction. The English language simply cannot contain the meanings of Love. Maybe that is why people have taken the word and abused it with everyday matters such as “I love that car.” No proper meaning of Love exists because one word is forced to support many different kinds of thoughts.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."