Easter thoughts

Our generation seems to be somewhat of a paradox. We are constantly being told that we are the most important thing in the world, that we have to be happy, and other people don't matter. Then you turn on the radio. While half of the time they're singing about love, happy endings and about how they'd do anything to find the right person, how they can't help falling in love... the other half of the time is dedicated to singing about purely physical, lustful relationships with meaning as deep as a teaspoon - dehumanising entirely the other person. The worst is when there is an attempt to overlap both and say that this physical transient physical proximity is what love is. I keep thinking: is all this motivated by the other or by the self? By the need to love, or the undeniable need to feel loved? 

The only thing I can think of, when I see singers singing about such things in such sexually appealing clothes with tons of makeup and CG to have the right cheekbones, the fine face, the muscley (but not too muscley) body, no flab, no flaws (and no human factor about them at all), the only thing I can think of is something C.S.Lewis said in Mere Christianity: 

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Let me explain with an example from cognition and behavioural neuroscience. Suppose we had stomachs but there was no food in the world. We would spend our lives starving, looking for what would take that pain away. It's our behaviour, we are wired to do two things when hungry:

(1) We are motivated to seek food, work for it; 

(2) Once we find food, we are then motivated to consume it. 

Our brains have complex circuitry giving us this behaviour and rewarding us when we do this, and we are 'rewarded' also by our brain when we complete the task, that is why we keep doing this. 

So, when I see people seeking for something to fulfil this desire in them - some may seek physical pleasure without commitment, others seek love or platonic idea of love our society says we should seek and find, I do not see what they are doing, but I see that there is this desire, this motivation, this drive. In the metaphor, I do not see their seeking for food behaviour - I see a society made mostly of empty stomachs. 

However, at the same time we have increasing mood disorders pointing to the fact that our wiring is going wrong: depression, maniac depression, anxiety, all these things are increasing and becoming very debilitating, having a high social cost. So I can't help but think: what if we are seeking in the wrong place to fulfil our need and desire? Why is it that at the end of the day we are all chasing sunsets, chasing meaning in these things that end up being cyclical - after every love song comes a break up song, and then another love song. We seek, we fail, we seek again. What if we are just trying to distract ourselves from the true pain and need in what we really were wired for? 

What if the love we seek is nothing but a mirror, a dream of the love we were made for? 

A month or so ago I purchased for myself a book called The little book of love, a small book with quotes and thoughts about love that I got because I wanted to have a quote a day to think and mull over as I went about my daily activities to try to be less centred on myself and more on others. Today my quote was as follows: 

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

- Rumi

That is what Christianity is about. Actually, that is what today, Easter is about. The news of the Gospel, all that we believe, is that we are already loved. We needn't seek any further, we needn't try to do absolutely anything to be loved. We already are. 

Yesterday I heard someone talking about a newborn nephew and saying "He isn't much good for anything yet, you know. He just cries, and wants to be with people and taken care of, and only really thinks about himself." But still, the family cares for him and loves him - even though he really hasn't done anything good. This is how we are loved by our heavenly Father: though still self-centred, though still foolish, and crying, and begging him to care for us, and seeking love and approval elsewhere, he still loves us. 

He loves us so much, he would die for us - or better, he did. Because he is infinitely just, he could not ignore all our wrongs. But because he is infinitely loving, he payed the debt himself, with his Son's life because the Son chose to love the Father and love us altogether. 

I know, it may be hard to wrap your head around it (most of the time my difficulty is not in understanding the mechanics of it, rather it is in understanding what would motivate him to do something like this for us, these self centred silly little beings pottering about hurting other little beings) - but that is just one of the many ways we have to take down the barriers of logic, of selfishness, of narcissism that we have built against this awesome love. 

Maybe then we can truly respond to this love (not out of fear), but with love too. Maybe then, we can seek the other, not to fulfil our desires, but in response to the fact our deepest desire to be accepted and loved already has. Maybe, like this we can truly learn to serve the other - not out of need, but out of choice. And choose, like Jesus did a couple of thousand years ago, to sacrifice what we want in favour of others. Just then, maybe we can start to get our love songs right.