All You Need is Love

Yesterday I had lunch with 17 men whose only common bonds were their friendship with and affection for Pat Mullen and their having gone to the Jesuits for high school and/or college. It was almost entirely a wonderful experience. The conversation was easy; no one was texting or checking his cell phone; and there were lots of funny stories, most of them true, all of them self-deprecating.

But I am prone to abstracting things beyond all recognizability so part of me part of the time was wondering about the people from those stories who were no longer with us, who had died. Died! These were vital, enjoyable people, people whose presence in my life made it better and more meaningful, and now they were gone. How could that possibly happen? What could that possibly mean?

And given that the lunch group was made up of men who were 70 and 71, I smoothly shifted into wondering about our deaths. How we looked and how we acted did not line up with my image of being 70 and yet I know that none of us has too terribly long to be here. Being there in the midst of all that vitality and energy and humor, it was almost impossible to imagine.

This kind of thinking leads one almost inevitably to some kind of fatalism, a spiritual throwing-up-of-hands, a giving up, and I could tell that I wasn't far from that.

This morning I was blessed by a Facebook post by Darya Bronston, a long version of the Liberty Mutual TV ads based on the notion of paying it forward (you can see it here), and it struck me that in the midst of all the confusion and contradiction that is life, the one thing that is always true, that always matters is acting in love.

Aristotle taught essentially the same thing, except that he framed it as "practicing the virtues." He knew that the only way to achieve happiness --- not pleasure or the satisfaction of desire, but happiness --- was to act well.

And, of course, it was Jesus of Nazareth who taught this most powerfully: "Love another as I have loved you."

For those who are tempted to believe that this teaching has to do only with romantic or filial or familial affection, read Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 4-7. This is seriously demanding stuff.

And the much more recent Immanuel Kant argued that we must never treat other people as "objects" but only as "subjects;" that is, that we must never use people for our own purposes as if they were things but must always treat them with the respect that is due them because of their inherent worth and dignity.

To act in love always. Always. To use a line from one of the characters in the James Lee Burke novels, "everything else is just rock 'n' roll."

I recommend the video that Darya posted. I also recommend a Valentine's Day meditation I wrote almost five years ago: Devotions

And, as I say in the "Devotions," properly understood, John and Paul were right: "All You Need is Love."