The Virtue of Love

“There are people who go after your humanity…that tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it. It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of vitue.”

Tonight, my wife is weeping. It has been so many years since familiar voices were heard. Even when conversations are held there is a wall there. It really does not matter who created it. Each on our side have fortified it in some way or another. We are all imperfect but the thing we can do that, though we are flawed, when genuinely practiced will be perfect. 

What is that one thing? 

It is to love. Why? Because when it is genuine, it comes from one place and He is perfect.

Religion will always supplant love in the life of a legalist. Its possessors spout their doctrine to whitewash the sepulchers that hold their bones – devoid of life. Their walls remaining impervious. What is this really? It is false virtue. It has the appearance of life and even to some appears beautiful. However, the more it is lived out in one’s life, the more void is created –eaten out from within and eventually collapsing under its own weight. David spoke of evil as a luxuriant tree seemingly prospering in the face of those who resist it but in the end – eventually – it is rotted from the inside, cut down and burned. What is left is scattered on the winds of history.

The false virtue is always extreme in dysfunctional groups that focus on minutia that has no real relevance to the Way. Even though one following such is pointed to the minutia continually to disarm them of the power to perform personal reasoning. This is accomplished through some indirect and mis-applied virtue that is splattered on the psyche of the follower to the point it appears what it is not - genuine virtue.

This is the most heinous of acts: Taking the word of God and reducing it to control and not to free the bonds of God's children. In the end what is produced does not look at all like heaven but shrinks to twilight and that place where personal initiative becomes nothing more than reaction to improper stimulus much like a caged animal responds to electric shock.

How do I know this? Because when a person in the grips of false virtue is given a decision, they cannot make it, they are frozen in the state of ‘I don’t know what to do’ …so they do nothing. 

They regress to a hope and prayer that the feint scratching from the other side of the wall grows less frequent and more feint until the sound is only something that they perceive in their minds alone. This is akin to the loss of a limb and the phantom pain. 

A relationship was once there but now it is reduced to only a painful memory and one caught in such only seeks the repression so that it no longer abides with them. They become less like what they were and formed in the image of their focus: the one in whom they look to as an example. And it is not the Christ because if it was, there would be no wall, there would be no division only a bridge.

This is why relationships outside the bubble of the dysfunctional religious groups are so difficult. 

Why did I write this? Well there are at least two reasons:

First, it is for the reader who has lost someone dear and feels the phantom pain. Friend, please know that the pain you feel is on the other side of the wall as well. Although self imposed repression is occurring, so is the pain, the memories and the nagging doubt that something is wrong. How do I know this? I know this because the God we serve is Love. What indwells us is the very Spirit of Love and that cannot be repressed forever. False virtue can keep the body, mind and soul busy and distracted but it cannot control the spirit.

Second, for the slight and vaporous chance that the one on the other side of the wall will put down the notion of being offended (because it is founded in false virtue) and let themselves feel the phantom pain because it comes from a place that records what really has been done...what has been eviscerated from them by those that never had any one’s interest but their own. That once again they bend towards the wall they have built and listen for the scratching on the other side that brings the ultimate truth: they are still loved, they are forever caught in bonds of affection. One day the real scratching will cease but in the mind, it will never stop because it will be heard in the heart. It is the virtue of love and tragically their judgement.