Love for Self, Family, God, Humanity
Christmas Day, and I reflect that I am pretty content. Happy, satisfied. Not much to complain about. Everyone has things that they can complain about. I spoke to my daughter yesterday; I heard some concerns and complaints about the world as it is, as it has been, as it may be. I get it. I agree with most of those things of concern. All of us have things that we can and even should complain about. That is natural, and healthy, in my opinion, because without recognizing and diagnosing, and therefore analyzing our problems, we are not doing and accomplishing what we are all meant to do: solve issues.
What is an issue? Breathing. Eating. Thinking. Acting. Cleaning. Working. Supporting. Loving. Yes, these are fundamental things that all of us need to do. All of us have to do a combination of above to get along, to subsist or thrive. I will focus on the loving part in this holiday day post.
I am not talking about so much how we love, but who I love. I will get into a bit of the why, too.
Self
I have known myself for over fifty years, which is more than most people on the planet, I think. Part of knowing me is knowing about world population. Out of 8 billion living souls on planet earth, I am thinking that at least 5 billion are younger than 50. Younger than me in 2022. Places like Iran have a preponderance of younger folks; the grand majority of the continent of Africa are much younger people than the middle-aged or elderly. Japan has a more aged population than most countries, but they are no longer among the top ten populated countries in the world. Mexico has taken Japan's place at number ten for most persons on the globe; Mexico has more babies and younger people than Japan. Brazil has fallen from fifth place to sixth in population numbers, behind Pakistan. Pakistan is having more babies all the time, i.e. youth. India will pass up China as the number one population number on the planet very soon, which means India has more young people than China.
Youth are on the way! And I am no younger, only more senior, day after day. Incidentally, as I write this, China is getting COVID-19 in droves and many of their elderly will be passing away soon, thus making less elderly than me over this winter period.
But my point is, I am older or perhaps more experienced than most living people on the planet in 2022. Therefore, my perspective is valuable on a few levels. My dad is ahead of me over 33 years, but this is more based on me, a product of him and my mom, as of the 1970s. I remember quite a bit from the 1970s; I have studied and even retained a bit about the world history, therefore my observations may contain some value. Perhaps I have some wisdom and good knowledge or perspective to impart. This is my paeon to love. Paeon is not the right word that I mean to say. Maybe I mean "ode", but it is not that poetic. This will be more prosaic.
You have to love yourself. It is okay, and even healthy, to critique things and issues about yourself, to "stay hungry", to seek to improve and change, but it is fundamentally necessary to love yourself, to care for yourself, to do things that are interesting and motivating, yea meaningful, to yourself. Part of loving yourself is figuring out what you believe in. I believe in God. Country, family, community, respect, art, nature, literature. I believe in love. I believe in many, many things and their subsets. Believing in those things helps me stay motivated and interested in living and loving myself, which lead to living with, living for, and loving others.
Family
A large part of who I am is my immediate family, who I am with now in 2022. However, there was my immediate nuclear family that I came from before that present one developed in this current century. Without recognizing and paying tribute to my immediate first family from the 1970s and 1980s, I am not truly in touch with my own self, my own origins. Plus, there are still most of the people in my first family that exist and that I interact with. These are people in Indiana, Illinois, and Utah. A couple immediate family have passed away, but the love that I have for those that are buried (yes, interred, not cremated, but those details are immaterial--pun intended!--) is still real and part of my life. We do not give up loving those that have passed on. The dead, too, are part of who we love.
Love is eternal. Love leads to bigger things and quantities than the sum of its parts; love is deeper than mere speech or noise, acts or thoughts, or even emotions. Love is bigger than all these things. And that process of love makes us who we are.
History and Security and Sacrifice
We are one human family, so if you love yourself and your immediate "seres queridos" (Spanish for dear ones, or loved ones, people that you care about), then it is likely that you love bigger and grander circles around you. That includes the greater communities that surround you, like your neighbors on your street, the people that participate in your local schools, houses of worship, businesses, the people who mow lawns in your HOA (Homeowners Association), the people who collect your trash, the police and firefighters that roam the streets when called upon, and on and on.
Who else do we love and appreciate? The donut servers, the breakfast cooks, the waitresses and grocery store workers and deliverers, the airport baggage packers, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) guards, the pilots and flight attendants pushing people around our amazing spherical orb a mere seven or so miles away, a distance some of us have run on one occasion or another, or some of us run now or plan on doing in the future. Who is within seven miles of you? Quite a few people that we recognize, but some of whom we can forget. There are people in Maryland within seven miles of where I live. I am thankful for good neighbors in Maryland. I lived and loved with many Marylanders this past year. I will never forget them. I love them.
Who were these souls from Maryland that I care for? Those that I loved and will always love, because of who they were to me, and ultimately who they are, regardless of me? Men and women who served their country abroad, that I volunteered to work and live with? A private from Essex, a specialist from Middletown, another Specialist, in his late thirties and going on ten years as a junior non-commissioned officer, from Baltimore, a sergeant from Prince Goerge's County (who works on dozens of unsolved homicide cases), a First Sergeant from Baltimore, who is a wizard at chess, a major from greater D.C., who is also wizardly at chess, and quite a few more people from all parts of that state. Males and females, Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American. I love them.
Oh, and they are soldiers for the United States, too! I love the troops of our country and most countries. I recognize them and I am grateful for what they do, what they stand for, what they are committed to. Most people in military uniform are dedicated to peace. My nephew in South Korea is ready for war, for battles and firefights, but he is preparing daily, weekly, and monthly for peace. I certainly love him, for more than one reason.
Approximately one million troops have died while in service of our country's military since 1775. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians fought and perished fighting the Hitler machine alone, in a few short years, to save their country and to save the world from that particular tyranny. Without the eastern deaths and sacrifices of them on the steppes of Europe against the Germans of the 1940s, many more Americans would have died, more than were cut down in the English Channel, the beaches, swamps, and rivers of France and the Low Countries, the forests and mountains of Germany, or Italy or the Kasserine Pass of Tunisia.
I love those that gave their life and service for my country, whether I know them personally or not. I know some buddies that have served nobly in uniform and have taken their own lives. Rob and Nicholas, I love you and I respect you. I cannot understand why you ended things as they happened, but I will always love you. God loves you. I appreciate what you gave to me and all around you. Both of them have produced work that still exists, that still may make a difference in the battles of life and death that are waged by us survivors each day. Thank you. I hope to see you again, as I believe God and Heaven await. I have that faith. Both of you are too good not to be there. I hope to live up to that promise.
Thanks and appreciation for Alyssa Petersen, who took her own life in Iraq, but perhaps saved many people from humiliation, torture, or death there, in that ancient land, and in other places where our military goes. I love you Alyssa, I understand your demise; I wish we could have been there to figure out a better way. But, your life is noted, and you and your causes are not forgotten. Morality and decency are not dead. We will remember and fight on. The terrorists will not win, even those within our own ranks.
Christ said, "Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing".
Yes. We know that there is good and evil in the world, in life.
I love the dichotomies, the dualities, the paradoxes; I will not despair or give in due to wrong choices and evil designs. The bad will not overcome the good. We shall overcome.
I love a veteran buried to the east of Richmond named John Clinch. He is there as so many thousands of ignominious fighters who either died of sickness or in battle, bloody combat, sacrificing all for the preservation of a nation that believed that the Constitution drawn up in the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia meant that all of us have institutional, even Divine rights, that no other power nor body can take or steal from us. We are born free. When Clinch died, maybe 1864, and not a relation of mine to my knowledge, there were some four million Americans, plus perhaps another million or more native Americans, that were not free. They were in bondage, or they were subjugated or relegated to less than human status. Like the Twelve Tribes of Israel of Egypt, there were humans who were not in charge of their own lives. They were owned by other humans.
We all sacrifice to have autonomy and freedom. I love this struggle, and it almost never comes easy. It comes with losses and pain. Like childbirth. Like the quest for life itself. It ends in death, or the victory over temporary pains, but it is all with the journey. It is worth it.
I love it. From Moses and before him in the Bible, to crossers of the Bering Strait, to the more recent settlers of our great continent, to the builders of the Wall of China to stave off the Mongol hordes, to early bipeds of the deserts and plains of southern Africa, I love it all. Even the animals and beasts that sustained us and hunted us, then and now. However, most animals are for our good. Humanity greatly benefits from our lesser cognitive cousins in nature. Even bugs. I love you, animal kingdom. You have not killed us yet. You have given us more life than you have taken.
God, the Divine
Creation and cosmos and infinite things are impossible to understand, hard to fathom. God, and the gods, the divine and the eternal are not quantifiable, empirically measurable. We sense things about the eternal that we cannot fully explain. A bit like love. "God is love" quotes the scripture.
Yes.
God is hard to define, hard to contain, hard to quantify, but hard to love?
I believe it is easy to love God, or whomever we revere and worship, if we can wrap our heads around life itself. I love God, because I believe that he loved me first.
To quote a childhood song:
He gave me my eyes, that I might see, the colorful butterfly wings
He gave me my ears, that I might hear, the magical sound of things He gave me my life, my mind, my heart. I thank him so reverently For all this creation, of which I'm apart Yes, I know Heavenly Father loves me
Again, God is hard to define, hard to contain, hard to quantify, but is He (or they) hard to love?
I believe it is easy to love God, or whomever we may worship, credit, or acknowledge for our life and creation. I have many more blessings to see and understand than problems and negative issues with the cosmos. Our planet is pretty much perfect. During a cold winter in the northern climes, have you ever been to the Bahamas? What is there to complain about? There are ills and problems, but the good outweighs all else. Good is greater than bad.
The way that I understand God, life and death is designed as they are for a reason. Or many reasons. I love this fact, a fact for me. God created all of what we are and will be. Even who we were before, was due to Him. God placed me here, and has me with ten functioning digits on my hands, where I can type (only with maybe four to six of them, as I type), and think, and reflect and ponder, and record.
I love that. I love this. I love you. I even love those that I have never met, but they contributed to me, to you, to us. The millions of Russians who perished to the Germans when my parents were small children. Those police who gave their lives in our country this year. There were firefighters who died trying to save us. I love them, without knowing their names or numbers. I know that they exist, or existed, like God and Heaven. Like my friends, living and dead. Like my heroes, living and dead.
I even love my enemies. Because, in the end, all of us are part of God's plan.
God does have a plan, to allude to a song of a Canadian rapper that I partially quoted in a church talk (sermon) about a month ago. God's plan is love.
Love is one continuous round. It is infinite, it never ends. It is, to quote a book by a cosmologist Freeman Dyson, "Infinite in all directions." To quote a hymn from my mother's funeral service in the chapel that I was raised in:
There is no end to matter; there is no end to space
There is no end to spirit; there is no end to race.There is no end to virtue; there is no end to might;There is no end to wisdom; there is no end to light;There is no end to union; there is no end to youth;There is no end to priesthood; there is no end to truth.There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;There is no end to being; there is no death above;There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;There is no end to being; there is no death above.
LOVE YOU. LOVE IT. LOVE IT ALL.
