Life is a funny old thing

Devil worship for a Christian shouldn't be something that one just lets pass by. When a member of ones congregation is upsetting ones worship by introducing non-worship songs in the middle of ones church service, when one experiences them laughing at the mere concept of holy water as something that one does accept and even buys into, when one starts eating the wrong kind of food again just to punish oneself through the body, when one allows in general lust to overtake love, etc., etc. it's indeed important enough to stop and wonder about it all. Everthing is linked with each other. Evil is out there alright but it's never taken too seriously. I'm changing my eating pattern yet again and concentrating on love. God says, “Do this and you will overcome evil with good: Let love be genuine.” In other words: “Love must be sincere.” It must be authentic! There must be no pretense – no play acting, nothing fake or false. Let your love be the real deal. How to deal with crooked people? With love. How to deal with religious differences? With love. How to deal with ones own self-loading? With love. How to deal with someone one really loves? With love :-) The painting is The Denial of St Peter by the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst. No need to explain what's happening. How does one return from that? Through love in love and with love.

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way–an honorable way–in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.” (Man’s search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl)

Frankl claimed in his book that there are three ways to find meaning in life: through work, through love, and through suffering. Frankl kept his will to meaning—or his desire to live a meaningful life—alive through his three years in the camps by focusing on the potential meanings he could create for himself. Man's Search for Meaning is not an easy book to read. Dr. Frankl provides grisly details of his experiences not to fascinate the reader but rather to illustrate the brutality and inhumanity of the concentration and extermination camps. At the end everyone needs to conclude that ones own search for meaning is the primary motivation in ones life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by oneself alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy ones own will for meaning. Frankl defined 'tragic optimism' as optimism in the face of “pain, guilt, and death,” or “saying yes to life in spite of everything.” This kind of optimist belief is one that can make suffering meaningful and use guilt as motivation to improve oneself, and when one should interpret the “transitoriness” of life as a reason to find ultimate meaning. Here I must warn against the often mishandled Frankl's triad of pain, guilt and death because only love has the true antidote :)