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| In a message dated 6/27/2005 10:48:51 PM Pacific Daylight Time, bnolledo@juno.com writes: I must hasten to congratulate you for doing so much more than others.You display not only charity (which is the love of God mentioned in the passage below), but also courage. If you do all that praying and meditation and come out of it teary-eyed, then, you have been touched and perhaps, more than you're willing to admit, you and your group are actually proving your love for God. Whether you like it or not, God looks kindly on you. Can we say to God "we don't need your praises?" That's not what He gives anyway: He prepares a room for those who love Him, that's all. Keep up the good work, and keep the faith. Blanca Well, thanks, Blanca. For the encouragement, that is. But I know, unlike others, I am still short of the supposedly expectation of the Lord from all people. I miserably fail to please him completely according to my church's standards. I don't know but, honest, I can't love my all my fellowmen - just 99% per cent of them perhaps, and they are mostly the people I don't even see or interact with. The ones I really love using my heart and soul are those that are close to me, my family and friends. I can be at peace with most people though, if that is already love. I can co-exist with them, if that is love at all. You see, my love can not be bought, like I already said before. It is something very special, and it can not just be forced. In the letter I'm forwarding below, Jane has explained to me what "unconditional love" means. What she wrote was something I've read before many times in the past. What was inculcated in me and which I believed when I was little and through the years until just a few years ago is something I no longer accept after really searching for the truth at a later point in life. This is partly perhaps because portions of what is in the New Testament run in conflict with what is in the Old. If they can't make the two agree with each other, why do they have them both? A God with a fair sense of justice that he enforces (and eye for an eye), and then a God with forgiveness to everybody beyond measure and with no discrimination. And then this thing called "unconditional love" - whatever the original author really meant by it! Unconditional love, I think, means no hate at all. Which means no punishment! It's like about a mother that does nothing when her children hurt one another. She so loves them all equally that she spares the rod and embraces both the guilty and the aggrieved. Somehow this love of hers spoils the brat and the good one goes on suffering in the hands of his unrestrained sibling. Had she given one a reward for being good and some punishment for the one that was misbehaving, maybe everything would have gone in the right direction. Because of this so called unconditional love, coupled by total forgiveness - something only beneficial to the criminally inclined, there are now many that are no longer afraid as before in committing heinous crimes. Cells in prisons can attest to this. There ought to be something to be afraid of. If each individual perhaps were to live alone on an island and has nobody else to love but himself, or at least can just have with him there only the company he wants to keep, he can have that kind of love envisioned by our inspired writers. Because then he does not have to deal with people that might violate him or do him wrong. But he lives in a world with people of all kinds: artists, con artists, businessmen, thieves, doctors, assassins, philantrophists, rapists..... He can either be helped by these people, or become their victim. Is man supposed to give unconditional love to all these characters? Is he not supposed to love only those that deserve it? If he forces his love which for all he knows is absent, would he not just be accused of faking? Why is there a goal that is so hard to achieve, given the feelings and nature we have been born with? Ernie P.S. A person's determination can be best tested when he faces something as terrible as being a hostage and tortured and threatened by a bunch of terrorists. Then he would perhaps be more in a position to define what "unconditional love" really is. |
 eiturla@aol.com |
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