Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Love

What Matters Most……..Commentary by Jim High

One of the books that is a part of my early morning ritual is Divine Sparks by Karen Speerstra.  She calls it the collected wisdom of the heart.  Actually it is a book of thousands of quotes about various words, ideas and concepts from almost 1,800 different people arranged in alphabetical order.  The first word is “Abundance” with seven quotes, and the book ends with the word “Zoroastrianism,” where five quotes are displayed.

So how does one use and make sense of such a book?  I decided to read it straight through by reading all the quotes for each word starting with the word abundance and reading only the quotes for one word each day.  I started at the first of the year, and since there are just over 500 words, I won’t finish reading this book until about the middle of next year. I also try to determine the best quote for each word and highlight it.  Sometimes there are several best quotes, after all these are all quotes from people famous enough to have their quotes remembered.

Last week I had made it to the word love.  Love has more quotes listed than any of the words so far, fifty nine in all.  I’ll probably not find another word in this wonderful book with more than fifty nine quotes, which is understandable because to quote someone we’ve all heard that “Love makes the world go round.”

But reading those fifty nine quotes on love got me to thinking more deeply about love.  Where does love come from?  Does love exist apart from our lives?  Why do we humans love?  My answer is that love comes from within us, love therefore doesn’t exist apart from our lives, and humans love because it is the easiest and fastest way to receive love from another person.  And the love of another person is what humans want most in this world.  Unconditional love from another person, I submit, is the greatest feeling in all the world.

The more love we have in our lives the better lives we have.  The only way to get love is to give it away.  Love over comes hate just as light over comes darkness.  Love solves all problems.  Love is the essence of life.  As babies and small children, we are loved and cared for by our parents and others, and the measure of the love we experience then determines the love we have that can later by freely and unconditionally given away to others.  Love is learned early in life by being loved.

My brother and sister and I have often remarked how lucky we were to have grown up in a home full of love and stability.  Even with four generations under one roof, my Great Grandmother didn’t die until I was eight years old, there was never an argument, disagreement or even a slammed door that any of the three of us can remember.  One of my favorite pictures is of my Great Grandmother and me sitting on the living room couch.  I’m about three years old and she is reading to me.

Love is such a complicated and powerful emotion that the Greeks had four words for love.  Eros is used to describe passionate love, with sensual desire and longing.  Storge means affection in Greek and described the natural affection like that felt by parents for their children.  Philia means friendship or brotherly love.  Agape means unconditional love.  Agape is used in the biblical passage known as the "love chapter", 1 Corinthians 13, and is described there and throughout the New Testament as sacrificial love.

What Matters Most…….I’ve picked three of those fifty nine quotes to help answer that question.

“Everything wants to be loved….You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk.” –Alice Walker – The Color Purple

“Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.”  --Wayne Dyer

“You know I’m really convinced that if you were to define love, the only word big enough to engulf it all would be life.  Love is life in all of its aspects.  And if you miss love, you miss life.  Please Don’t.”  --Leo Buscaglia – Living, Loving and Learning

© 2011 #20  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467


Thursday, November 10, 2011

Voting Matters

What Matters Most………..Commentary by Jim High

Last week the voters of Mississippi said “NO” to the Personhood Amendment and many Mississippians breathed a sigh of relief that maybe, just maybe, it is a sign that Mississippi has turned the corner, and can now begin to address the issues that matter and that will begin to move our state forward instead of backwards.  Regardless of your opinion for or against the Personhood Amendment two things need to be said and understood loud and clear.
First, it was a very poorly thought out piece of legislation and for that reason had it passed it would have brought many unintended consequences to a great many women and their families.  This is probably the major reason that it lost.  So we should learn from this how important it is to get proposed legislation right before it becomes law.  A lot of the problems we face in our country are due to the unintended consequences of poorly thought out and constructed laws, that might correct one problem, but cause many other unintended  problems.  And then we complicate this problem by passing even more laws instead of backing up and starting over.

Sometimes issues are so emotional and ideological that reason, logic and sometimes even justice go out the window.  We can and should prevent that by thinking laws through completely in advance.  The voters of Mississippi proved themselves worthy of thinking in advance when they voted down Prop No. 26.  And we are all better off because rational thinking matters.  Voters around the country seem to be getting the message also because last Tuesday many elections overturned laws that the majority did not like and did not want, like the law in Ohio to strip public union workers of their collective bargaining rights, and the various recall elections held in several states.

The second thing last week’s defeat of Prop No. 26 should tell the people of Mississippi, and the nation for that matter, is that issues that are purely religion based have no place being enacted into law in a nation founded on the principal of separation of church and state.  This is becoming all the more important as our great nation continues to become the melting pot of free people from around the globe that it has always been, and was intended to be from the very beginning. 
As I was growing up in Tupelo in the 1940’s and 1950’s we only had Protestant and Catholic Christian Churches and a very small group of Jewish people.  And we were all either white or black.  Look at Tupelo today; it is very different.  We have a Muslim Religious and Community Center, a Temple for the Hindu faith, an Eastern Orthodox Church, large numbers of Latin American Catholics, and also many new people from Japan and other Asian countries.  In addition the Christian churches now come in an almost endless variety both inside major denominations, and as completely independent stand alone congregations. 
With all this diversity it should be perfectly clear that the religious beliefs of any of these different faiths and their particular beliefs, whatever they are, should not be codified into the laws of our city, county, state or nation.  Freedom of and from religion needs to be maintained as an inviolate principal of the United States of America.  If we are not tolerant of others regardless of their faith and beliefs, how can we ever expect to live in peace with one another?  And isn’t living together as one people, one nation, and one world what the human condition is all about.  I believe that it is.
Our world continues to grow and evolve.  There are now 7,000,000,000 of us on planet Earth.  We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years from separate small tribes, and we all still have our tribal mentality, but we must learn to lay it aside and recognize the humanity in all people, knowing that everyone is our brother, our neighbor, and that we are all our brother’s and our neighbor’s keeper.  That is the future.  That is the take away lesson from last Tuesday’s elections, not just here in Mississippi, but all around the country.
What Matters Most…………VOTING MATTERS.
© 2011 #23  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467