Celebrating love

I was still pondering LD's reply to Dowd's article, when it came the Feast of All Saints.

I must say I found that actually LD's refutation came out nicer than my comment. I don't really care about poor Dowd, save as an example of how those like her – they like to call themselves "liberal" – don't seem capable of thinking out the implications of the positions they take.

They can be dreadful: like, say, that there are no feasts.

Why?

Because they tell us that we don't have anything to feast about: to celebrate.

And again, why?

To answer, let me start by asking another, exemplary question: what do a man and a woman do when they celebrate the day of their marriage?

They consciously bring back to life the moment in which they said "yes" to each other. Or, I could say, the moment in which they told to each other "I love you". Every time we do it, we do it afresh. Think of how squeamish we are about all the sweetness of love vocabulary (and all the poetry that originated from it) when we are not actually in love. After, when we fall in love, with no effort we slide into it.

Let's make from here a step further: by telling each other, in whatever way, "I love you", we celebrate love.

I can love because other people loved each other, from their love I was born and in their love I grew up.

Of course I am giving the exemplary case. May be they ceased to love each other. But it is always of their old love one lives, however wounded and torn apart, and lacking therefore in celebration. Even when parents only separately show love to their children, it's always something that carries beyond each of them, to a more generalized love exchange.

When I tell somebody "I love you", I reactualize the same love my parents, their parents, and so on for generations unending, everybody in short, celebrated by saying it.

It is the same love of all the love poems ever written, of all the stories ever told, of how people exchange words, goods, and, allow me, body fluids.

Now, I would like to ask peoples of Dowd's persuasion what they think of this Feast of All Saints, in which we celebrate those among our deceased who lived a good life.

We celebrate them as being still living and feasting, i.e. fully enjoying now the feast of life to which we also partake, precisely by celebrating love.

I am afraid that they would tell me that these are just words, because love is only a feeling, aroused by our hormones when we see some fitting object of desire.

No, love is not a feeling, but the mutual relation making up the giving and receiving of life. Feeling is only the proof of our being in love.

HP