Asking the Question Today we ask what love is. Given how many people have tried to analyze the sensation, action, and essence of love, I suspect this attempt will leave us with more questions than answers, but we humans have always asked unanswerable questions. Why stop now? So what is love? There’s the welling up of tenderness in a mother’s chest when she gazes upon her child, the sensation of hormones that surge through a lover’s bloodstream, the unconditional regard of friends for one another, the reverent respect of student for teacher. But there’s also the adoring gaze of a hound for its human companion, the geese who spend their…
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Boundaries, Love, and Our Planet
Light that Knows No Boundaries Throughout the night, my neighbors’ lights blare from their house, spilling into backyards, trespassing into bedrooms, streaming into space. Light respects no boundaries. I can curse and cajole to my heart’s content, yet nothing will turn the glare aside except a wall or a shield. Even eyelids are not enough to protect us from the artificial glow that blights the world. So much brighter than any flame or distant star, the glare we have created confuses birds, leads turtles astray, and disrupts the hormones of every mammal, including ourselves. None of this matters when our fear of demons and criminals is used against us to…
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That No One Have Holes
No Holes The old woman in Catherynne M. Valente’s novel, Deathless, has no name, yet she still suffers. Her soldier son, Vitaliy, died when a bullet pierced him through. Even so, when Ivan Tsarevich wanders by, a stranger to the woman as she is a stranger to him, she invites him into her home. She shows him the food on the plates and tells him to eat. He should eat, he should get fat, he should live. “Be alive,” she tells him. She says this because she knows about holes. Her son died because of the hole inside him, and she, too, has a hole “like a bullet” in her…
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Jonah and A Message for Our Time
A Call to Compassion Once upon a time, there lived a prophet named Jonah. He was a real person who lived sometime around 800 BCE, but the story in the Bible that contains his name wasn’t written down until about four centuries later, and it hardly represents his life accurately. Indeed, it is a satirical tale, but it offers us a serious message. Jonah’s name means “dove.” Since the dove symbolizes Israel, we can assume that Jonah symbolizes her, as well. He was also the son of Amittai, whose own name meant “faithfulness,” but Jonah was far from faithful. When God told him to go prophesy to Nineveh, he ran…
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Free Will and Microbes Among Us
Not Captains of Our Souls The more we learn about the creatures who inhabit this planet with us, the more obvious it seems that, regardless of what William Ernst Henley believed, we are not the captain of our souls, nor can we master our fate. [1] Yes, to some degree we can choose how to respond to adversity, and this is really what his poem is about. Written when he lay ill with tuberculosis and feared he might lose a foot, which was especially worrisome because he’d already had one leg cut off when he was sixteen, Henley’s poem honors his courage and his “unconquerable soul.” His words have inspired…
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Compassion, Pity, and Helpfulness
Why Help? As social creatures, we humans help one another. For their book, How Can I Help?, Ram Dass and Paul Gorman collected stories and wrote reflections about many aspects of helping. [1] Their book starts by describing a time when we lived in communities and helped our neighbors because the need arose and we were there. One simply pitched in. But helping has never been that simple. Some of us feel another person’s pain and want to relieve it, while others of us help out whether we empathize or not. Maybe we feel guilty or ashamed if we don’t help, or we’ve always done what society or our family…
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Our Natural State of Altruism
Is Altruism Real? Some people claim that altruism is a myth, that we humans do nothing except that it serves our own ends. True, there are those who calculate the value for themselves of everything they do, whether benevolent or hurtful. They don’t understand that altruism feels good. It boosts endorphins, increases oxytocin levels, and sends dopamine to our dopamine receptors, but only if we act out of a true desire to help and heal. [1] Perhaps those who discount altruism do so because they have no such desire, so have no idea what it feels like. Concerned more with their own reputation or financial well-being, their own comfort or…
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The Love that Saves
Does Love Save? During a recent sharing circle, the question of love came up. What kind of love can save the world, we wondered, and how we might learn to love in that way? Saving the world is a sweet idea. I’ve written about how joy could save the world, so why not love? Yet to think we can save an entire planet is also absurd, at least if by saving we mean that one day there will be peace and cooperation everywhere, respect, and generosity, and a deep, abiding kindness. Such values exist in pockets in every country and in every village, but so does animosity. All these and more are part…
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Nothing Is Personal and the Book of Job
Staring with Job Job took nothing personally. You know Job. He was the “blameless and upright” man from the Hebrew Bible “who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). Blessed with a fine home, ten children, many servants, and thousands of sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys, he was one of God’s favorites. Then one day, God bragged to Satan about how much Job feared and honored Him. “There is no one like him on the earth,” said the deity, “a blameless and upright man” (Job 1:8). Satan wondered if this was really true. “Does Job fear God for nothing?” he asked. “You have blessed the work of his…
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Hagar and the Power of Naming
The Power of Naming When he enlisted in the army toward the end of World War II, my father changed his name. A Jewish refugee from Germany, he was traumatized by and ashamed of his heritage, so perhaps that had something to do with his rejection of his birth name, yet it was also common practice back then for immigrant soldiers to change their foreign names to English ones. In any event, Karl Heinz Stiebel become Charles Harry Stevens. Did this matter? Changing his name made it easier for him to pass as “white,” which he did. At one point, though he considered himself an atheist, he attended a Methodist…