Snapshots and Synapses

The Foundation of Love  Some of the best things in life are easy to understand but hard to implement, and when the simple things get difficult, our tendency is to over-complicate the simple. Love is a great example. It is both a decision and a feeling, and because it is often made up of such conflicting desires, people sometimes give up on understanding and refer to it as a great mystery of life.  There are seven Greek words for love and three Hebrew words, but we only need to be focused  on divine love. Paul wrote about this kind of divine unconditional love that is often quoted at marriage ceremonies:  Love is patient. Love is kind. Love isn’t jealous. It doesn’t sing its own praises. It isn’t arrogant. It isn’t rude. It doesn’t think about itself. It isn’t irritable. It doesn’t keep track of wrongs. It isn’t happy when injustice is done, but it is happy with the truth. Love never stops being patient, never stops believing, never stops hoping, never gives up. ...

I’ve been around for over a half-century, and I’ve learned a few things. Some of them I’d like to unlearn, which I’ve found is significantly harder than learning. Unlearning is not as easy as forgetting, which happens all to easily. Unlearning takes a lot of concentration, to deliberately not think a certain way after having questioned it and found it lacking without letting go of the elements of truth that were useful.  Athletes sometimes have to unlearn bad habits to build up good habits. Being raised Catholic was a good thing for me that God used to develop my relationship with Him, but for me to grow in my relationship with God and others, I needed to unlearn certain things. For example: my 16 years of Catholic education had taught me to ignore the Old Testament scriptures as part of the Old Covenant, but the New Covenant as described in the New Testament was all I needed to learn. While I’m sure that not all Catholic education teaches this, it was something I needed to unlearn...

I grew up beneath the poverty level in America; I recall watching the news one evening as the commentator stated the poverty level income for a family of four in America, so I walked into the other room to ask my mother how much “we” made that year as family of five, and she gave me a number lower than what I had just heard on the news. I’ve since seen abject poverty in this world and understand on many levels why my mom insisted that we weren’t poor; we never went without food and our utilities were never turned off from lack of payment. As they were devout Catholics, my parents somehow even found a way to send us to a Catholic school.  Still, I felt like we were sometimes looked down upon by others. When it came time to think about life after high school, the guidance counselor did her best to convince me that I was not college material, despite my >4.0 GPA and high SAT scores. I was fortunate that Vice Principal Tully did not look at me as white trash like the school counselo...