Love. A blog from John Alen

LM2                        LOVE ?

Am I lonely ?   Are you lonely ?    I was an only child.   I was surrounded by adults who were preoccupied and anxious about the gathering and ominous cloud of the Second World War.   In those days children often felt excluded.  I was told – “you are too young to understand”.  But I never felt alone.

Waking or sleeping there was a constant conversation in my head.   Was I a dreamer (at school my teachers told me to stop day dreaming) or was I being very silly, simply talking to myself ?   People who think they hear voices can be dangerously deluded.   Trying to remember, I think the conversation was wordless and silent.   It was more like the awareness of a friendly, reassuring presence.     It gave me the courage to be myself. At the moment of birth when our cord is cut we are entrusted with the most precious gift we shall ever have – the gift of life which is the gift of selfhood.   This is our inborn capacity to relate, to ask and to receive, to love and to be loved.

I have come to believe that I am only alive because I am loved.    Human life is Love ?     What is Love ?   Is it not the heartbeat at the pivot of all reality which overflows and endows life and wellbeing to all that exists ?   There can be no life without a beating heart to sustain it.   There can be no such thing as a heart without the ONE whose heart is the origin of all existence and meaning.

This is the inexplicable mystery that thinking people have pondered through the ages.  Who is or what is this ONE ?     Out of this store of human thought emerge many versions of philosophy and religion.   All this would be a mind blowing tangle if it were not for one word – LOVE.   Every human being is aware of this restless and longing urge which draws them out of their personal loneliness.   It can inspire the very best in each one of us.   We reach out from ourselves, upwards and onwards.    Many of us first experience love in a special relationship.   But I have come to believe that such a love is a first step into a greater love – of this world, of humanity and beyond and within – that some call the love of GOD.

But the very mention of GOD puts some people in a defensive mode, just as some people may wish to protect themselves from pain by avoiding the danger of “falling in love”.    I could not bear to contemplate this world if there was no such thing as love. And many, myself included, fear to face up to a world without GOD.  To make sense of our life we have to make a choice or fall over a cliff into the eternal unknown.  I will try to explain my choice and I hope,   help you  to make yours.