A Love That Never Gives Up
April 30, 2024
Hi!
How is each and every one? Tomorrow May
1, aside from being Labor Day, a public holiday, it is the feast day of St.
Joseph, the carpenter worker. He is a
good carpenter. Remember? Jesus is known by his father, ‘isn’t
he the carpenter’s son’? Jesus who is said and identified as He who did
all things well, qui
bene omnia fecit!, is the son of the carpenter! His father must have taught him well. Indeed, like father like son! What an honor
to St. Joseph. Jesus reveals him to us.
Ergo, therefore, are you and I not excited to go to St. Joseph ‘Ite ad Ioseph!’ to ask him to teach us how to do our
professional work, duties of the moment, any task for that matter well? I am
always excited to go to St. Joseph. He
is the patron saint of four things. Go to St. Joseph to ask him for different
concerns in life: for a good husband,
for a good profession, for interior life and vocation in general, for a happy
death.
Moreover,
May is a popular month dedicated to Our Lady, right? Customs of Flores de Mayo and santacrusan are
held during this month. Exciting isn’t it?
Pilgrimages to Our Lady in her shrines or churches dedicated to her are
also being done more during this month. They
are referred to as May pilgrimages. On the first of May, Pilgrims walk early at
dawn praying the rosaries to Our Lady while heading towards Antipolo Cathedral,
to Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage. On March 25,
2023, the Antipolo Cathedral was declared International Shrine of Our Lady of
Peace and Good Voyage by Vatican making it the first in the country and southeast
Asia. The date for the declaration was
chosen because of the significance to the history of the image as it was on
March 25, 1626, that the image of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage was brought
to the Philippines from Mexico 397 years ago (AOC, Archdiocese Office of
Communications, March 27, 2023).
Given
that you and I care for so many things personal and global, let us together go
to St. Joseph and Our Lady for these concerns.
They will surely intercede for us and our prayers will be as powerful as
ever. Let us pray for peace and charity
in the minds and hearts of each and every one the world over.
Let
us now continue and end with the rest of the symphony of love of St. Paul from
the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 4, nos. 116-119.
I
thought it best to first share with you the following letter shared from one of
my viber groups.
A
secret letter from 1938 attributed to Albert Einstein…
It
was hidden from the public until 20 years after his death. He didn’t think humanity was ready for his
message yet. Are we ready for this now?
Albert
Einstein, who we all know was a great genius. Wrote some letters to his
daughter, Lieserl back in 1938, and he said, “Please hold on to these letters
because I’m not sure that humanity is ready for it.” So she finally released
the letters in 1980. And as I was reading this one letter that he wrote, I
thought this is exactly what we need to hear at this time. We are ready as a
humanity and going through what we’re going through at this moment, this are
the exact words that we need to hear.
“When
I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me. And what I will
reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding
and prejudice in the world. I ask you to
guard the letters as long as is necessary, years, decades, until society is
advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There
is an extremely powerful force that so far science has not found a formal
explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others and is even
behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified
by us. This universal force is love.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe, they forgot
the most powerful unseen force. Love is light that enlightens those who give
and receive it. Love is gravity because
it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power because it
multiplies the best we have and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their
blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is
God and God is love. This force explains everything and gives meaning to life.
This is the variable that we have ignored for too long; maybe because we are
afraid of love, because it’s the only energy in the universe that man has not
learned to drive at will. To give visibility to love, I made a simple
substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E equals MC squared, we
accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through Love
multiplied by the speed of light squared (Love x Speed of Light2).
We arrive to the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is
because it has no limits. After the failure of humanity in the use and control
of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent
that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy. If we want our species
to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and
every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.
Perhaps
we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to
entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastates the planet.
However, each individual carries within them a small, but powerful generator of
love whose energy is waiting to be released. When we learn to give and receive
this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers
all, is able to transcend everything and anything because love is the quintessence of
life. I deeply regret not having been
able to express what is in my heart which has been quietly beating for you all
my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to
tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer.
Your father, Albert Einstein.’
And
I do feel we are being called by life to create this bomb of love that
devastates hatred and that it is the ultimate answer for our species to
survive. And I pray that you will share
this on Facebook, Youtube, and your loved ones and maybe listen to it every
day. For the greatest of these is love. (Shared by Lita Hidalgo and received
24-III-24 in Family Occasions viber group).
Love hopes all things
Love
endures all things
118. Panta
hypoménei. This means that love bears every trial with a positive attitude.
It stands firm in hostile surroundings. This “endurance” involves not only the
ability to tolerate certain aggravations, but something greater: a constant
readiness to confront any challenge. It is a love that never gives up, even in
the darkest hour. It shows a certain dogged heroism, a power to resist every negative
current, an irrepressible commitment to goodness. Here I think of the words of
Martin Luther King, who met every kind of trial and tribulation with fraternal
love: “The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that
hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some
good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every
man and see deep down within him what religion calls ‘the image of God’, you
begin to love him in spite of [everything]. No matter what he does, you see
God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off…
Another way that you love your enemy is this: when the opportunity presents
itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it…
When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek
only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that
system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system…
Following is
another shared video by Mariluz in a viber group last 24-IV-2024. I transcribed it.
One
day a teacher asked her students,
tomorrow all of you bring some tomatoes in a plastic bag to school but there is
condition as to how many number of tomatoes each one of you have to bring. The
students asked, what is it? Teacher replied, You should give each tomato a name
of the person you hate and bring the number of tomatoes equal to the number of
persons you hate. If a student hates five people, then he had to bring five
tomatoes. On decided day the students brought tomatoes as asked and showed them
to the teacher. Some students had two, some had five, some even had twenty tomatoes in their
bag. Teacher said, your this week
assignment is that all of you have to carry this bag full of tomatoes with you
everywhere you go for a whole week
Students agreed. As days passed
tomatoes started to lose their freshness and got spoiled and because of this
tomatoes started to smell awful. After a
week teacher asked students how did you feel this one week. All students complained of the awful smell
and students those who carried more tomatoes complained about heavy weight and
smell. At this teacher smiled and said this is very similar to what you carry
in your heart when you don’t like someone.
You carry that hatred everywhere and that hatred makes heart
unhealthy. If you can’t bear the smell
of spoiled tomatoes for a week imagine impact of bitterness of hatred on your
heart as you carry it daily with you. The heart is a beautiful garden that
needs regular cleaning of unwanted weeds.
Forgive those who have angered you, this makes room for storing good
things. Get better not bitter.
119. In family life, we need to
cultivate that strength of love which can help us fight every evil threatening
it. Love does not yield to resentment, scorn for others or the desire to hurt
or to gain some advantage. The Christian ideal, especially in families, is a
love that never gives up. I am sometimes amazed to see men or women who have
had to separate from their spouse for their own protection, yet, because of
their enduring conjugal love, still try to help them, even by enlisting others,
in their moments of illness, suffering or trial. Here too we see a love that
never gives up.
With this post and the above, we have finished the
symphony of love from the Holy Father’s Apostolic
Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Chapter
4, nos. 89-119. In the next
post we will revert back and continue with the series on our divine longings
from Broken
Gods.
Until then,
take care, “May
tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may
God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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