Thought Picnic: The Dignity of Choosing

The Mystery of Love

One thing I have always held sacrosanct is not interfering in relationships. There is a complex dynamic between people who choose and admire each other for all sorts of reasons that outsiders may never be able to fathom.

The book of Proverbs 30:18-19 in the Bible informs me quite clearly, in the following words:

There are three things that amaze me—
no, four things that I don't understand:
how an eagle glides through the sky,
how a snake slithers on a rock,
how a ship navigates the ocean,
how a man loves a woman.

In the King James Version, it is written as "and the way of a man with a maid."

In these times, relationships are so diverse that the singularity of heterosexuality is no longer the sole expression of love, nor the only way to choose a partner. The way people choose whom they love, and why, will always remain a mystery.

Duty Rather Than Spark

This is different again from arranged settings, where external parties make the decisions that the participants must adhere to. Familial, customary, societal, political, or financial responsibilities usually influence such unions. People then have to make the best of the cards they are dealt.

Arranged unions are borne of duty, and the spark that arises out of attraction and leads to falling in love hardly fits with this topic. I acknowledge that such unions exist, and that affection may well develop within them over time, but that is a different matter from autonomously finding love for oneself. My concern here is with those who choose, not those who are chosen for.

When Love Turns to Harm

Even where I have harboured misgivings about the suitability of a match, I have always been reluctant and reticent to express a view, except where abuse is evident, and a partner is endangered. By abuse, I mean both emotional abuse and domestic violence, for neither is conducive to a loving relationship, and both can lead to harm of different kinds, including fatalities.

People in such settings need to be extricated before irreparable damage is caused. In those cases, there is no reason to sacrifice the person to an age-old institution for the purpose of saving face; the institution is not worth a life, nor the quiet erosion of one.

I am aware of the difficulty in all of this, for it sits uneasily beside my own principle. If an outsider cannot truly fathom why two people choose each other, that same outsider can seldom read what passes behind their closed doors. Abuse is rarely performed for an audience.

Harder still, the one being harmed does not always recognise the harm; what others would name as abuse can feel, from the inside, like an ordinary texture of the relationship. There is also the matter of shame. To admit to being abused is to admit, as many feel it, that one chose poorly, and so the stigma keeps people silent and keeps them where they are. Choosing to leave is therefore rarely as simple as being told to go.

None of this changes my conclusion; it only tempers how I hold it. The exception for danger stands, but it must be exercised with care, patience, and an honesty about how little we can see.

Freedom to Love

Beyond that, you are free to choose whom you want, and I bid you Godspeed that the companionship will be happy, fulfilling, and wonderful. How a person loves another can only be a thing of joy.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

I appreciate that there are people who would encounter great difficulty in understanding those who deviate from the heteronormative, but that difficulty does not invalidate the reality of it. Whether it is accepted or not, when one person meets another for the affairs of the heart and falls in love, it is always between them, to the exclusion of others.

A Hierarchy of Choices

It is a hard conversation that eventually has to be had: if your expectation of familial ties is to be chosen over an intimate companion, you have read the situation incorrectly. Once you understand the mystery that brings people together, you fall into a hierarchy of choices. A partner will be chosen first, over all other relationships, including close familial ties and long friendships. People should fall in line and respect that choice, just as they would expect others to respect their own.

What you will not get away with, then, is disrespecting, disparaging, ignoring, or deigning to reduce a significant other to insignificance. I know many will remain unpersuaded by that construct, and so they will land in the irrelevant scheme of things.

Relationships are acts of great determination on the part of the participants. The least that can be done is to accord them the courtesy of acknowledging that they exist, and to respect the one you know has chosen rightly for themselves.

In the end, this is only a plea for individual choice and the respect it is owed, and for the humility to accept that no one, however well-meaning, is equipped to choose better on another's behalf.

Postscript

Ignore this at your peril. The person who insists on knowing better, who meddles where they were not invited and talks down to the one another has chosen, does not preserve the relationship they disapprove of; they forfeit their place in it. You are not owed a seat at a table you keep trying to overturn. Respect the choice, or be left out of the life that choice builds.

A Gemini Notebook AI Podcast on this blog

Pentecost made real

Pentecost live and talking

Today is the Christian Feast of Pentecost which commemorates the event in the book of the Act of Apostles when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples like tongues of fire and they began to speak in the native languages of the diverse tribes that were present in Jerusalem at that time. [Bible Gateway: The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost]

I encountered glossolalia; the speaking in tongues by accident, as in early 1984 I was invited to the Christian Union building by some acquaintances in the art department who did not look like the typically austere and ascetic religious bible thumper types or those who seem to mistake the social ostracism as a result of their beliefs and conduct for spirituality and humility.

When we got to the building, they began to sing and then they were soon praying, everyone stopped speaking in English and started uttering an incomprehensible language that I thought was of a Middle Eastern origin. In the African-initiated Churches, they did have names and codes that sounded almost otherworldly, but this seemed different.

Then I spoke clearly

After the meeting, I asked questions and I was told about the speaking of tongues and a sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It was around this time that I found a new kind of commitment called giving your life to Christ and by that you become born again. Sometime after, I was prayed for to receive the gift of speaking in tongues, but I was not at the point where I could demonstrate this gift.

Then, there was a crusade on campus that a recently converted pop musician ministered at, he was Jide Obi. During the call for people to give their lives to Christ, we were in congregational prayer and from deep inside me, I had this welling up from within myself and began to speak in tongues.

Though, I have made the rounds of many churches and denominations, where the practice might be encouraged or discouraged, speaking in tongues is a personal prayer language that according to Apostle Paul gives you the ability to pray according to God's will. There are many situations where I have not found the form of words to pray for what I need and tongues with or without interpretation have given me the confidence that I am on the right track. [Bible Study Tools: Bible Verses About Speaking in Tongues]

A gift that works for me

There was even one occasion when our maid who spoke a language, I had no knowledge of was misbehaving and I cannot account for the situation, but I spoke to her in tongues and there was the shock on her face that I was telling her off for misbehaving in her own native tongue.

Even now that I attend the Anglican Church, I am grateful that this gift of God is present and available for me to use at any point I choose to.

I could be in a quiet place and or disturbed situation, I speak in the tongues I have been given to find peace, resolution, and breakthroughs. That is my own personal spiritual experience and the wonder that Pentecost has been to me. Receive ye the Holy Ghost, that is what Jesus Christ said to his disciples after his resurrection and before he ascended into heaven.

Thought Picnic: Letting blogs flourish in mystery and meaning

Like organic farming

In most cases, my blogs are raw and unpolished, apart from basic spellchecking and some attention to the basic rules of grammar to aid comprehension, I do little else. In fact, I am probably too lazy to even read the blog back to myself to ensure it reads and sounds right, I would think that is to be expected of personal blogs, unadulterated and without synthetic fertilisers.

Then, for those who read my blogs, there is a style and expression that is uniquely mine, you will find obscure and archaic usages and much as you will find unfamiliar words. I could be tempted into sesquipedalianism, but I more frequently resist the urge, though, it could be said the blogs do not cater to the lowest common denominator for readership.

Some air of mystery

I am of the view that the English language is very rich in expression and modality, and I have not mastered the simplicity of writing so fluently to address the broadest crowd that might happen upon my blog. It might be a failing on my part and it is one I am ready to accept as a weakness.

Generally, I hope my blog can retain a kind of mystery to the reader, by that I mean, you read what you see with all the possible interpretations that might arise in your thinking without enquiry as to first my mental state and then my presumed intentions. My blog is more of a journal with a public face, to review my blogs again for a target audience would defeat the journaling and diary aspects of blogging. Should there be a need for unravelling what is written, it might well be written into the blog itself.

Let the wild tree grow

Much as I would hate to be misunderstood, I am not striving to be totally predictable either, the questions anyone might have in their minds and many do not have any other means of contacting me apart from adding comments, certain clarifications can be requested but a full expository would be sating curiosity beyond the mystique of mystery and pondering. Let the blog flourish without the tendency to second-guess the writer.

Even when I do go over old blogs, the only corrections and modifications made are to spelling, grammar and context, rarely and I do not think I have had to rewrite a blog. I have taken down two blogs because they would have created difficulties for the subjects of my writing, beyond that, I follow the advice rather than the threat of the Duke of Wellington, "Publish and be damned."

I guess the question on anyone’s mind would be whether the blog was written for them or written for the writer by the writer themselves. One would think the latter is more plausible, then again, the roots of trees do grow in unpredictable ways and so an audience might think something applies to them, which one would suggest, is quite purely coincidental.

This thing called love

A mystery I live

This thing called love I cannot really explain, as I feel it in my heart, an emotion but not in the singular of thoughts and feelings that occupy my mind. All my senses are focused on the object of my desire, a desire that transcends every concept of what I can perceive with my senses. I think of him and I am in another universe of bliss and beauty that no words can describe and no talent in an artist can capture on canvas.

The capacity that in ourselves has for the reciprocity of feeling, passion, expression and love is written in poetry and sonnet, heard in song and music, yet is so uniquely individual and personal, the experience of another only partly describes the relationships of others.

The one who matters

You wonder how in the ocean of literally unlimited choice, one and just one becomes the one you find the unity of heart and life with. Notwithstanding that some one time lovers do drift apart for all sorts of reasons, we do not start the journey of love on the premise of its ending, we seek that it goes on forever.

That fact that we cannot see the future is a good thing, because we take what we have today, infuse it with hopes for the future and launch out on a journey of uncertainty with the view that the growing bond of strength predicated on an affinity that makes us glow from inside out in the presence and the arms of each other would see us through the storms and sustain us within the joys.

Love is a wonder

Not only that, but it is also how we draw strength from each other, knowing that we no more face the world alone but with an unimaginably formidable force of unity, in purpose, in direction, in attainment, in achievement, in success, in life and much more. The mystery of love and how it empowers lovers in the face of everything is still a wonder to behold.

I fell in love almost suddenly, and I know that this means so much more than I have ever felt with anyone else that we will get married and celebrate it to ourselves and anyone who will join us in this amazing thing. I love you, Brian, that is all that matters.

Is God trying to make His way home?

Mystery is awesome

The mysteries of life and what we choose to believe. I have many questions for which there are few answers. Something inside me suggests I ponder and meditate within rather than give voice to the misgivings, the misunderstandings and absence of clarity on matters I am trying to find rhyme, reason or rationale for.

Reason stands out as the place where I am allowed to consider, dispute, be persuaded, be convinced or otherwise. It is where the mind is exercised with knowledge and example, bringing you from what you understand to a place of faith and assuredness.

Rationale is for me something different, where situations and circumstances have to be given a basis for their existence without esoteric or ethereal underpinnings that cannot be explained away.

One of us to see

Much of what one might consider spiritual sits on a tripod and maybe a fourth leg of finding out more. The quest for knowledge, understanding, wisdom and experience must never cease. Curiosity ensures you do not fall to the delusion of having acquired all that is to be known.

In One of Us, a song first recorded by Joan Osborne and written by Eric Bazilian, I find myself gravitating to the cover by Prince in his multi-CD Emancipation album, which is a cut down version of the original lyrics. The lines below evoke a sense of awesome wonder to which one can only be forced to respond.

If God had a face, what would it look like
And would you want to see it
If seeing meant that you would have to believe in things like heaven
And Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?

[PrinceVault: One of Us]
[AZLyrics: Prince cover of One of Us]

We may or may not know what God looks like, the Bible says we are made in God’s image, but what representation or perspective is that? Are there physical, mental and/or spiritual dimensions to that imagery? [Knowing Jesus: Image of God] Further on in the Bible, it says, Moses saw parts of God, but not the face. [Bible Gateway: Exodus 33:18-20]

Spirited to new truth

Three questions bring the weight of the matter to the fore, the mystery of God’s face, whether we would want to see God’s face out of whatever human need presents and if after seeing we would be so convinced as to believe everything we have heard before.

Then that conversation between Moses and God, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” There is no life to live on earth once that encounter becomes a reality. It makes you wonder if the context of life is death or being spirited away from an imperfect earth like Enoch, Elijah or Jesus at His ascension. [Wikipedia: Entering heaven alive]

Sometimes, I wonder if indeed, we are ready for that experience and that is probably why, God is not one of us.

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