Personally, I am maddened by the abuse of this word. I have talked about it often. But my root work is figuring this love thing out. I did not feel loved as a child. My parents, like most of their generation, I think, never used the word. They never said they loved me.
That part I find very easily forgivable and forgettable. “Love” was not a word they used to throw around much, outside of church. But it was something expressed in action, in how parents looked at their children, in the care they took for them.
I would in fact assert as a general principle that if you have to tell someone you love them, you probably don’t. This doesn’t mean that even where love is present, you shouldn’t say so often. I believe you should. “I love you” is the last thing I tell my kids every time I see them or talk with them. They have heard it very literally many thousands of times over the years. But they feel it too, I am quite sure.
My challenge is that, to be loving, you need to feel safe to other people. To feel safe to other people, you need to feel calm and safe yourself. Paranoia, and chronic contextual overarousal, if not antithetical to love, is incompatible with it. And I am paranoid and chronically overaroused. I find it very hard to trust, to calm down. This makes it hard to love me, and hard for me to love others.
So, although my long term goal is to become loving, I have a very large amount of work to do. I get flashes here and there. My potential is enormous. I am extraordinarily perceptive when I am feeling good.
But in the long run, the only good plan for dealing with shooters is for all of us to become better human beings, better parents, better citizens, better friends and neighbors. The shooters, as I have said before, are just canaries in a coal mine. They are a symptom that far too many of us are not getting enough emotional nourishment, are failing to feel loved, are failing to thrive.
My work continues. It’s lonely, but it is my work. I am doing, as well as I am able, what I am on Earth to do. My progress is glacial, but I feel that when it breaks open, it will do so relatively quickly. Many processes are going on in the darkness, and when they see light, I will realize, I feel, I know things I did not even know I knew.
I want to found a new church, a new way of being socially, a new way of remembering God and appreciating the value of life. But it will not work if I myself am not in the right place. I pray every day for guidance and strength in this project, and if you are so inclined please pray for me too. I can use and will welcome all the help I can get. I don’t like being an island, but I can’t figure out an alternative. People don’t listen to me, most of the time, and it seems certain that some part of me is pushing them away; although, I think often people hear “inner work”, and they sense the pain, without feeling the possibility of the pleasure of release from cages.