Love is the noblest act that people are capable of: caring for others above one’s self, sharing with them all that one has, serving others and doing them good. Love brings out the best in people. All happiness emanates from acts of love. And yet, it seems to be the hardest thing for men to do. Instead, we see people harming and even killing one another; looking out just for themselves and let others be damned; amassing and hoarding limited resources even if others go hungry or naked; wishing evil upon others. Why don’t we seem to get it? Man for all his achievements seems to be so stupid that he does not realize he is on the road to self-destruction.
I also often do not get it. I miss the meaning of others. I only see things from my narrow point of view. Many times I have disappointed people I love because I was so dense I did not get what they were telling me or what it is they want from me. Many times I could have done better but I did not understand the instructions correctly.
I watched a documentary on planet Earth last night and saw its unfolding over four and a half billion years. Man’s presence on Earth, a few thousand years, is but a moment in that great expanse of time of billions of years our planet has been in existence. And now man has been thrashing and destroying a paradise in the last two hundred years (the times of man’s greatest scientific and technological exploits) what took billions of years to create. We are the apex of creation and of the evolutionary spiral. And yet, at the rate we are going, I wonder if we will last another thousand years, much less a million.
What irony! What hubris! We do not get it. Will we ever get it? When will we ever learn, if ever at all? We are on the verge to wiping out life here on Earth.
With you is the fountain of life, O Lord.
The disciples approached Jesus and said,
“Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?”
He said to them in reply,
“Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven
has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.
To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich;
from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
This is why I speak to them in parables, because
they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.”
Matthew 13:10–13