The Hour I Never Really Had

The Hour is coming
Can I feel it come?
Can I hear it go?
That silence sounding...

The Hour is gone now
And all I feel is
And all I hear is
Resounding heartbeat...

Where has it gone to?
Hour I never had
But time I gave you...
And so, not quite gone.

Desire

Chocolate, almonds...
The snow is blowing outside.
Sweet and warm and... Mmmmmmm...

Hope and Faith and Love

I finished the last post on this topic with a statement that surprised me when I wrote it: Unrequited love is a hopeful response to the dilemma of freedom.
I did a double-take when I wrote it, and I almost tried again with something different, but I'll stick with it.
I need to clarify my statement, though: unrequited love is not a limitation on hopeful action. Rather, unrequited love cannot become Genuine Love until the action behind it moves beyond hope into the realm of faith.

"Hopeful action" is close to being a misnomer, because hope is not action-specific in the same way that faith is; i.e. one can even be hopeful without acting. Hope is a state of mind; still a decision, but not a decision that needs an external expression.
That said, people will almost always express their state of mind in one way or another, and hopeful actions are very common. What distinguishes a hopeful action from a faithful action is the release of control.
When Job is at his lowest, his darkest, his most depressed, he cries out that his "hope has been uprooted like a tree."
Still, even without hope, Job insists on praise instead of despair:

"As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.
"Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God;
Whom I myself shall behold,
And whom my eyes will see and not another.
My heart faints within me!

Perfect Love, Faithful Love, drives out fear; hope is demolished by dire situations. The freedom that we are afraid of losing is something that, ultimately, we cannot claim any real hold on. The freedom of Faith, the freedom that provides a foundation for Genuine Love, can withstand anything.

I think I'm done now. Thanks for reading, I hope you got as much out of this as I did.

The Dilemma of Freedom

Faith is the evidence of that which is unseen...
It's always seemed to me that Paul makes the definition of faith more confusing than it needs to be, but on the other hand he gives me a lot of room for exegesis.
Example: "Faith is the only evidence I'll ever have for those things I cannot see." I can't remember where I heard this interpretation first, but it certainly works. Let's run with it.

Faith is an attribute of human freedom. Animals don't have faith: they understand the world based on natural, observed principles. If your relationship with an animal is reliable, the animal will come to depend on your reliability in a kind of trust. If you break that trust, however, the animal will stop depending on you.
Humans, on the other hand, have an incorrigible ability to choose trust. Even when people break our trust, we can decide to continue our relationship in an attitude of faith. Note the difference: trust is still gone, but it's been replaced by something similar.
Faith and hope are responses to the dilemmas that freedom presents. A dilemma is (in traditional western logic) a special situation in which the outcomes of possible decisions are all equally bad; the decision is impossible to make on strictly evaluative grounds. Any response to a real dilemma must be something other than a natural response; either a deferral of responsibility for the choice (eeny-meeny-miney-moe) or some kind of "illogical" reasoning. Hope and Faith are two different kinds of "illogical reasoning," and the Christian life is full of faithful and hopeful responses to dilemmas; Genuine Love is the greatest of these.


Love is the ultimate faithful, hopeful response. "I can't trust you, but I have faith in you." "This hurts me more than it hurts you."

Genuine Love is a Faithful decision. Unrequited love is a hopeful state.

Unrequited Love and Freedom

The kind of love we hear about most "in our day and age" is what I will call unrequited love. The most frustrating aspect of an unrequited love is that it isn’t really love at all; it can never be love, and yet has all of the trappings of "that which could be love if only it were what it weren’t." (confused yet?) Each moment of unrequited love is filled with a desire to transcend, to become something more, to prove (i.e. to test) a deep and enduring nature full of benevolence, self-sacrifice, and hopeful enthusiasm.

Unrequited love proves false from the very beginning when compared with Genuine Love. There’s an old maxim about setting free the things we love; I must insist that until the beloved is set free, he or she (or it) will never be more than an “object of love,” something to be possessed by the thoughts and intentions of the lover. Genuine Love never exists in this kind of state; rather, Love is not a state at all: Love is an action. “Love is a verb.” Unrequited love is a state of desire, a kind of hope (or, in worse cases, of fanciful wishing) that exists in the space of awakening to Genuine Love (or to misery.)

Freedom is the most essential part of Love, if only because it is the most essential attribute of human existence. If we are made in God’s image and other animals or plants or minerals are not, then what makes us distinct? We have been given the option, every moment of every day, to choose how we will experience the world and how we will respond to it. This gets wrapped up into a lot of humanist pseudopsychology; recent examples range for pop rock lyrics to self-help books like the Secret. I think there’s a very God-serving spiritual principle behind most humanism, but the application is often a misdirection. Christ tells us to ask from our father, to re-imagine the law and the prophecies about Jerusalem; guided meditation or positive thinking might get us to a similar place, but I think it’s pretty obvious which has more significance in the grand scheme of things (and which is being a bit deceptive in order to sell books.)

I'm trying to condense this as much as possible, but I probably should have written an essay instead of 'blog posts for this one.

More to come.

Love and Freedom

What is love, anyway?
I was playing Max Payne 2 last week, and inbetwixt the bullet-riddled action sequences I found a small quote about love that I thought was worth mentioning.
Max suffers from survivor's guilt: his wife and child were brutally killed by the mob (yadda yadda...) and he's trying to come to grips with a life outside of his avenging angel lifestyle.
At one point, he says something about realizing that his love for his wife was as dead as she was, but that it is also the only kind of love that he can possess.
I heard a man on a radio interview say that his most valuable possession was his wife; whether that's true or not is beside the point. A possession will never be something that you love; only something that you control.
Love is a reciprocal and free action, rather than a state of being. Love can't be reduced to just any kind of dependency or "intimate relationship," those states of being and relating include too many other things.

I'm pretty sure that "love" is a decision, and that "being in love" is the most misunderstood phenomenon in modern life.

Stay tuned for more on Love, Freedom, and Pirates...