Time Immortal

Last week, Count Roland also wrote in with some thoughts on this article, about how many Canadians profess greater love for their pet dog than for their own father. I’ve just been lax in posting his thoughts.

They do need to give their heads a shake. But it may be to remind themselves of the meaning they are imparting when they speak of ‘love‘.

Today we have lost the Greek nuance and use love to mean many different things, from pleasure-induction (”I love chocolate”) to self sacrifice (the love of husband and wife for one another and for children for whom they and their friends express gratitude to God, pray for the new family as nurturing gifts from God and give congratulations for expanding the universal Church through the expansion of the domestic Church for which the blessings of God are asked for).

They may be correctly using a weak and partial meaning of love insofar as pets can give things — such as companionship and acceptance — which may be lacking from otherwise good parents for reasons beyond either party’s control. But love as it means in its fullness this is not. And to miss this difference is to impoverish our language and our lives.

I think it almost can be taken as a given that when anyone in the media speaks of “love,” they are not speaking of love in the fullest sense of the word, and certainly they are not capturing all the nuance imparted to the concept of love by the Greeks. But then, the same could be said of most musicians (I will grant some exception for a few country artists) and actors/actresses. Love is very poorly understood by our modern, post-Christian culture, and I cannot help but think that the departure of our society from Christian ideals has both precipitated and paralleled our departure from understanding what love really is.