Tag: Trump

True love, which always speaks the truth, is the only antidote to the lies and fake news of today

Love is an overused word today. We find it everywhere from graffiti-laden locker room walls to the heart emojis in anonymous internet chat rooms. It sells everything from underwear to Ferraris. It is confused with every kind of feeling and state and emotion. I’ve been thinking of the casual way I misuse the word love:

I love chips

I love a nice lie-in on a Saturday morning

I love Liverpool FC

I love preaching

I love salt

I love a good game of hurling

I love a book that captures my imagination

I love relaxing on Cape Clear island in the summer

I love Munster rugby

I love history and politics

I’m sure all of us can come up with our own list of ways we misuse the word love.

But what is the true meaning of love? For those who are Christian, if we want to know what true love is, we need only look at God. God is love, St John tells us. God not only loves, God is love. And God showed us what true love is like by sharing it, by shaping us like himself, with an inbuilt capacity for loving. By sending his only Son among us to show us how to live.

The nature of true love is spelled out for us in St Paul’s famous ode to love that is read at so many weddings: “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious, boastful, rude, and arrogant. Love does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful, love takes joy not in wrong-doing but only in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

That is the definition of true love.

True love does not change with the times. It can be cheapened by misuse and overuse but its essence never changes. Love is not infatuation or lust or obsession. It is not servile submission or putting up with. It is not grasping or abusive or domineering. It is not a one-night stand or a casual fling with someone whose name you forget the next day. True love overcomes, forgives, endures, sacrifices, empathises. It never gives up on anyone. It sees the good in everyone. Love, true love, is our best nature because it is God at work in us.

True love is never selfish, never all about me. When you love it’s not all about you anymore, you empty yourself for the one you love. You die to yourself for the one you love. Think of the give and take in a marriage or a committed relationship. Think of the parents of a handicapped child who spend themselves for that child every single day. Or the one who cares for an elderly parent. Patience, sacrifice, devotion, willingness to be there for someone always – that’s love.

True love speaks the truth. Or, as St Paul puts it, love delights in the truth. It always speaks the truth, no matter how difficult or dangerous that might be. Love speaks uncomfortable truths, whatever the cost. We can think of politicians, presidents and others throughout history, and especially today in this era of fake news, for whom that concept is alien.

Andrei Sakharov was a brilliant scientist who helped develop the Soviet Union’s nuclear programme. The Communist authorities honoured him for his achievements. But then he began to speak out in favour of social justice and human rights and against the bomb. So he was stripped of his honours and sent into internal exile in the city of Gorky, where he could contact no one. He was punished severely for telling the truth, as so many of his country men and women were. But he did not back down and he was vindicated in the end. Love speaks the truth no matter what the cost.

Love risks everything. It pays any price; lays everything on the line. Think of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who willingly gave his life in Auschwitz for a man he did not know. 

True love risks everything.

The Bee Gees were onto something when they asked: How deep is your love?

What being pro-life really means (and why yesterday was a good day)

Yesterday, the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker, making her third in line to the presidency. It was a good day for democracy and many people rejoiced.

Of course, most evangelicals and many in the American Catholic Church did not rejoice. They don’t like the Democrats or Pelosi. They have bought into a rugged individualism type of politics and religion that rewards wealth and hard work and individual freedoms like the right to carry weapons (it’s why they can support a twice-divorced, tax-avoiding, sexist, racist, foul-mouthed president as someone specially anointed by God). For others, their opposition to Pelosi and the Democrats has got to do with abortion. This one issue frames their entire political thinking.

Of course, abortion is a critical issue. Preserving life, protecting the most vulnerable and defenceless, has a particular urgency for Christians because it is literally about life or death.

But what many forget is that being pro-life is more than being anti-abortion. It is to support life from womb to tomb. It is to seek to do all we can to protect and enhance life outside the womb as much as inside the womb.

This is known as having a consistent ethic of life – that, as Christians, we support everything that is pro-life and oppose everything that is anti-life. The late Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago described this stance as ‘the seamless garment’ approach to life issues. Christians believe that all human life is sacred because every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. And so, for us, all issues to do with life are of one piece, like a “seamless garment” (a reference to the garment Jesus wore before his crucifixion which was woven seamlessly from top to bottom).

Life issues are interrelated, interconnected, seamless. As Cardinal Bernardin put it: “Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.”

If we are committed to “preserving life” (opposing abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, etc), we should also be committed to “enhancing life” (supporting social justice, care of the earth, those on the margins). In other words, being pro-life is all-embracing.

That is where most in the Republican Party and in other right-wing parties get it wrong. It is certainly where so many conservative Catholics and evangelicals get it wrong. Already the newly inaugurated right-wing, evangelical president of Brazil is opening up the Amazon to even more exploitation and is rolling back hard-earned rights won by minority groups. Where is the Christianity in that?

Three ways to be a good news person

There’s been so much bad news over the past year, indeed over the past decade, that it can feel overwhelming. It’s a situation made all the more toxic by the Trump White House and the Brexit mess.

Aware of the prevalence of bad news stories, and the impact they have on readers, The New York Times newspaper decided some time ago to introduce a feature called The Week in Good News. This weekly newsletter, it explains, is meant to send the reader into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart. It includes little items of good news that readers otherwise might have missed, little stories that act as a welcome counterpoint to the surfeit of bad news that fills the rest of the paper.

A good approach to the new year would be for us to focus more on good news and less on bad news, those stories or opinion pieces that agitate or divide. While we can’t avoid the news if we wish to be informed, we can choose how to process it.

My advice to self this January is to remember three words beginning with  the letter ‘c’ that I hope to incorporate into my daily living:

1. Be clean. English is a rich language with about one million words. We don’t need to use bad language to express ourselves, even if an image of Trump or Jacob Rees Mogg pops up on the screen.

2. Be courteous. Use only words that are respectful, that honour rather than dishonour the other. This is hard to do, especially if we get angry easily or suffer from road rage, as I do.

3. Be constructive. Use words that are positive, not negative; that build up rather than knock down, that are life-enhancing rather than life-diminishing. This means resisting the urge to gossip or to damage another’s character, which is also hard to do, especially in the highly inflamed social media world of today.

The power of language is extraordinary. We should try to use it in a positive way.