22-4-96
Our lives are defined by fear and love. These emotions are enticing and terrifying; dangerous or useless if you delve into the darkness that accompanies them, yet spiritually nourishing if you accept their contradictory power.
Behind them lies time.
Love for our neighbor, faced with our individuality. Fear of the certainty of illness, aging, and death, and the uncertainty of God. The need for an identity, sought in our birthplace, our childhood, and the global burden of culture we carry. Emotions simple in experience, yet impenetrable in the attempt to control them, form the mesh on which our lives are woven.
Unable to accept them as they are, we transform the abstract into the concrete, resorting, sometimes naively and sometimes cunningly, to categorizing them into “Ideals,” “Values,” and “Institutions,” into “Homelands,” “Churches,” and “Families,” to reconcile with their demanding presence and cover their painful absence. By negating their significance, mocking their function, and adulterating their purpose, we limit them so that the neighbor becomes a compatriot, our identity a geographical marker, our loves degrees of kinship, and our unknown God a doctrinal leader. Classification and definitions erase the anxiety of difference and ignorance, as our fears and loves are now enveloped in specific, identical forms for everyone. The emotions are now controlled.
Yet, time continues to elude us.
Nowadays, as they say, ideals have given way to material values. But these are not what brought the greatest disasters in world history. At least not as long as they were used through the honesty (and brutality) of the measurable interests they represented. They had to be covered under organized and grouped “ideals” and “values” to become truly destructive. Something that the new “enlightened” apologists of “idealism” and “institutionalism” seem to forget.
Is it appropriate, in an organized (and for the first time acknowledged) attack of material values and interests, to respond with a new ideological group enlistment that exploits our emotions to give new meaning to old institutions? Have we learned nothing from the well-intentioned enlistments of history?
Now that the Middle Ages seem distant, let's not be nostalgic, but instead trust each individual's ability to live with their own “institutions,” to resist with the spiritual values they develop, and to have the freedom to provide their own answers.
After all, time will always elude us.
Plato Rivellis