Pride 2007 II: Love is it a choice?

I was looking at the float picture from my last entry and kept seeing the word love all over the boxes and of course shirtless men trying to come off sexy and desirable. But what is love? Is it little more then an amorous moment in our lives or does it express warm attachment and enthusiasm that comes from a strong affection or devotion for another. Love is passion but more importantly it’s also a choice. This doesn’t mean that our feelings will always remain the same everyday for the other but it does ultimately mean we are a gift of self-donation to the other through good times and through the hard times. I believe it is difficult for most because being fallen in nature we limit what love should mean and can mean finding those around us incapable of being a true gift of love. But it’s the unique gift of choice and the ability to make a commitment that is the singular difference between us and the rest of creation. People cannot be so easily dismissed because no one is replaceable even if we live in a culture that tells us differently. We all have something special to offer that makes us unique, precious and irreplaceable.

Often in my past I have found myself compromising the person I was to be something I’m not. I suppose that is something most of us can relate too. We defend our behavior and place limitations on love as we express ourselves with actions of “sexual liberation” but what is hard for me to handle sometimes is whenever you compromise what love means in the end you find yourself lonely or sad. The question I keep asking myself is if I am a gift of self-donation to another and in turn they give the gift of themselves to me how can we be lonely? I believe we become lonely because in those moments we have turned our gaze on ourselves, living out actions that are self-seeking in nature. To me, how I was raised, God is love and the reciprocal gift of self to another is an expression, an image, of how God loves us. We actively co-participate with God as we image him fully in how we express our bodies. When we have relations with another we are in actuality just outwardly renewing through creativity our commitment to each other by offering in humility the gift of self. By allowing ourselves to search out intimacy by means of self-gratification we limit the opportunity to experience fully what love actually is. Love is not selfish and it is never self-seeking but is always a gift of self to another. However often in my life I settled for a false love because I desired intimacy but my heart was so bruised that I only allowed myself to do such actions in a controlled environment. In the end it hurt me by limiting my vision of what love can and should mean. Selfish actions like this always in the end leave me longing for more and I became enslaved to my member.

It gets hard sometimes being alone. It’s hard to crucify the old man to embrace the rebirth of the individual we were created to be. It often seems easier to live in the illusions that those around us have normalized then to live out our lives with a sacrificial gift of self. We let our heart envy those around us but when you look at our culture you see so much promiscuous behavior that I have often wondered what is it that I’m suppose to be envying so much? I find it so amusing at times how jealous I get over the pig-pens others live in because our culture has lifted them up to be the embodiment of who we are suppose to be. I make no quorums of my sexual past and realize clearly the damage I have done to myself and damage I have caused to others perpetuating this behavior that first made me prey then predator. I feel a great sense of shame at times when I begin to slowly realize what damage I have played in other people’s lives because I was self-seeking. The choices others make are not my responsibility but what I do with my body is my responsibility. I still wonder why we find it so arousing to hurt other people, to have relations with innocent men taking from them something that is precious and beautiful and perverting it and leaving their hearts wounded and often broken with little or no understanding to what they just did. Why do we objectify ourselves and wonder why in the end no one sees us for who we are? So many of us are intimate with those who are married or dating others, paying little attention to the pain we are playing out in there spouses heart. It’ almost as if at times we also view a partnership between two men different then that of a straight couple and we wonder still why the culture around us doesn’t understand gay relationships. What role are we playing out in demonstrating to the world around us that we understand what love is and we too can live out an expression of love with our actions?

So many try to rationalize our choices saying what we do in our private life affects know one and doesn't harm anyone. Not true. Everything we do affects others and in the end affects everyone. When we fall there pain is my pain and when they triumph there joy is my joy. We are all one family interconnected in so many ways through so many people. I am not defined by my past. It has made me who I am today but it’s what I do with it that defines me as a person.