Contemplatives are great lovers

SORRY, but I have to disagree with that naughty meme often seen on jeepneys and other public utility vehicles that say that drivers are great lovers. No, they are not, unless they learn to be contemplatives who can always think and see God and other loved ones in everything or whatever they may be doing.

When a person is truly in love he will always have his beloved in mind. He is driven with a passion to serve his beloved and to make the beloved happy.

It’s time to examine ourselves if indeed we are truly in love because we always think of God and of the others and are driven to make them happy by doing precisely those things that would make them happy.

Very often, we just say we love God or we love this person or that. But such affirmations remain only in intention and words. They are not actualized. They are not translated into deeds. In fact, soon after making those affirmations, we forget our beloved and proceed to pursue our own interests.

That is why it is important that we learn how to be truly contemplatives. Loving is not just doing things without thinking of the beloved and without offering the things that we do for our beloved. Loving will always require an abiding spirit of contemplation.

Without this contemplative spirit, we often get lost, carried away by other forces and impulses. We end up doing things simply for our own good and not for that of the beloved.

Without this contemplative spirit, we will miss that crucial element of loving that involves a continuing renewal of our energies. We end up feeling simply tired and exhausted, empty and used, and quite prone to looking for bad forms of self-compensations like drugs, sex, or simply wasting time, etc.

That’s why Christ told us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Mt 6,33) It’s when we have this attitude and behavior that we can truly say we are both contemplatives and lovers. In this way, we keep ourselves like branches vitally attached to the vine from where we continue to receive the necessary power to love.

How important it is therefore to encourage and train everyone in the art of contemplation that is driven by love. Especially for those couples who plan to enter into marriage, one of the basic and important things to check is whether they know how to be true contemplatives in all the circumstances of life. It’s an indispensable operation of every lover. We should explode all the other myths and fables about love.

It should be obvious that all this effort to be true contemplatives in order to be true lovers would require constant effort and struggle. We should not forget that we have to contend with tremendous enemies, foremost among whom are our own selves.

In this, what might be helpful is to make use of human devices that would always remind us, encourage us and move us to love. No matter how little and insignificant they seem, they actually are effective in starting and keeping alive the dynamics of love.

If our contemplative spirit is properly grounded and focused, that is, on God first before anything or anybody else, we can go beyond our material and temporal dimensions, our many worldly and human conditionings, and enter into the true and ultimate workings of love that has God as its source.

Whatever happens in the drama of our life of love, as long as we have God as the source and end of our love, we would know how to react and behave, how to continue loving, even in the worst of scenarios.