Category Archives: Marriage

Teaching the Value of Love

February 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

“We don’t teach values.”  Sex educators fond of promoting condoms and birth control to teenagers are also fond of making this claim.  “We are values-neutral!”

It’s never been really clear to me just why they take such pride in these claims.  It seems to be a sideways admission that one has lived on the face of the earth for nearly forty years and has been unable to come to any conclusions about what really matters.

This prideful admission that no values are important enough to single out for passing on to our children was birthed in the 60s.  Bored with tradition, and encouraged by our relationship with science and the brave new world of space flights and men on the moon, America launched into an artistic love affair with hopelessness.

I distinctly remember crashing into this dark fantasy in 1969 as a freshman at Arizona State University.  A group of us freshmen on the sixth floor of Manzanita dorm packed into a car one Friday night and headed for the drive-in to see Midnight Cowboy.

From beginning to end, watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why this film had won the heart of America.  While viewers found it elevating to see the naive male prostitute Joe Buck and his sickly friend Ratso struggle to survive on the streets of New York City, they had to overlook the fact that Joe Buck and Ratso were lying, thieving thugs.

Their story could have been more cheaply and honestly told by standing a camera in the middle of the worst, dark New York crime infested streets and filming the muggings, beatings and killings that hurt people and landed perpetrators in jail.

In one case, real-life criminals were given cells and prisoner numbers.  Their attitudes and behaviors were considered hostile to civilized society, and they were expected to reform.

In the other case, celluloid criminals wore fancy duds paid for by wardrobe, showed up in Hollywood limos for a red-carpet walk down the aisle between the rich and famous, and walked away with an Oscar.

Our love affair with the crass and dark and hopeless and brutal and profane is also a love affair with failure.  We are failing to stake a claim on what our responsibility is for raising the next generation of Americans…our children.

The latest episode of focusing on failure is taking place at Orono High School in Maine.  Out of the hundreds of thousands of books available for educating freshman, the English department settled on “Girl, Interrupted.”  The school is defending their choice as “real.”  These memoirs of author Suzanna Kaysen’s hospitalization in a mental institution at age 18 contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts and suicide.

Is this the best picture of the “real” we can offer our children in a literature class?

Then, after freshman English, do we send our children to sex education for a lesson on how to put on a “real” condom because we tell them “real” children in the “real world” are going to have sex anyway.

And, finally, when parents come to school to demand answers and a change in the message of what “real” is and should be, do we tell them they are pushing their values on a school system where values should never exist?

Values?  Is there anything we do or say or think in our entire life that doesn’t involve making a value choice?  Values-neutral?  Who are they kidding?

If love makes the world go round, when are we going to elect this value as worth consideration in our movies, our songs, our English classes…and, most importantly…our sex education classes?

If you live in Orono, Maine, or in any other city where you care about the values we are teaching our young people, there is a great book to recommend to your high school English teachers.  The Art of Loving Well is a new and novel idea for many educators.  It is a book that knows the values that matter and takes the time to make them matter to young people.

This 340-page anthology of ethnically diverse selections, includes short stories, poems, essays, drama folk tales and myths that elevate the values that matter most for the happiness and future of our young people.

Values-neutral?  Impossible!  The Art of Loving Well lays claim to its responsibility for passing on worthwhile values to our children, helping adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through good literature which reveals the complexity of life and love relationships.

English teachers…teachers of all kinds…are always teaching values.  “Reality” is a poor excuse for defending the kinds of books and movies we offer our children.  We offer it because it is real?

Love is real.  And if we want our children to be successful in love, then it’s about time we started teaching the values that matter most…the art of loving well.

October 10, 2005 – Wonder Love

February 21, 2005 – Sex Without Value

 See Archives for more past editorials.

The Gift of Kindness

February 13, 2006

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.                                                                       —Mother Teresa

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

A string of pink and red balloons waves high in the air, visible from the road a mile away.  They fly, tied to the top of a 15 x 15 ft. open air tent, calling attention to the temporary marketplace in the parking lot, just outside the grocery’s main entrance.

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Churches were decorated for Sweetheart Dinners last Sunday.  Today, flowers and balloon bouquets were loaded early in the morning onto delivery trucks.  Kids all around the country drop valentines into decorated shoeboxes for their classmates.  And, on their way home, last minute shoppers can pull up to the white tent and grab a potted red geranium, a box of chocolates, and a bottle of champagne.

Nothing is too good for a sweetheart.  In the age of the Internet, there are endless ideas for that perfect gift to communicate your amore.  At Amore’ on the Net you can find it all in one spot.  Two chubby cherubs drop little hearts down the page, dragging visitors below to a pulsing heart and a list of perfect Valentine’s Day ideas.

Even Chef Emeril Lagase isn’t afraid to “kick it up a notch” with his “special treats for your loved ones.”  Who wouldn’t feel loved being served banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise?

I’m a great fan of food, and I must admit, banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise prepared a la Chef Emeril wins the day over such extravaganzas like the giant human-sized stuffed red teddy bear I saw a man carry to his car.

Valentine’s Day is a great reminder of just how important it is to tell people we love just how important they are to us.  And, in a year where we have dedicated ourselves at FROM THE HOME FRONT to a consideration of love, it seems appropriate to ask…

Why can’t every day be Valentine’s Day?

Imagine buying the perfect Valentine’s Day gift, worth a million dollars, but costing you only a moment of thoughtfulness.  A renewable gift.  No shopping required.  Handy at every moment, just when you need it, in unlimited quantities…every day of the year.

Give the gift of kindness.

Love is patient, Love is kind.1 

Love is a choice…a choice to be patient and kind.  Who can’t afford such a luxury in a modern world where we are supposed to have everything?

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.2

How nice it is to be greeted in the morning with a kiss and a Good Morning, I Love You.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. 2

Smile.  How wonderful to be greeted by the smiles, even of perfect strangers, during the day when the daily battle has worn us down!

Look in their eyes.

Pause…stop…listen.  Listen.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn’t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.3

Without holding your response in your mouth, waiting for your turn to speak…listen.

Love is kind.

I would give up receiving a dozen, dozen red roses, just to have one person spend a week devoted to kindness in my honor.  You?  How hard it is to listen with an empty mouth!  Yet, motivated by love, I think I just might be able to manage.

We must give what we hope to receive.  Let it begin with us.

Love is kind.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.   (Mother Teresa)

 

11Cor 13:4 [NIV]

2 Mother Teresa

2 Mother Teresa

3 Hugh Elliott

November 12, 2004 – Old As the Hills

See Archives for more past editorials.

Love Sick

February 6, 2006

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.                                                                                                                         Mother Teresa

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Born on May 6, 1856, in Moravia, Sigmund Freud was destined to radically alter the understanding of the human heart.  Freud graduated as a doctor in 1881, and his initial professional work involved research on the uses of cocaine.  But over the next fifty years, following his fascination with dream analysis, Freud developed the new field of psychoanalysis and, abandoning his Jewish heritage, embraced atheism.

Since Freud, many new theories of human personality have been constructed.  And the U.S. Department of Labor reports that psychiatry and psychology are the “fastest growing occupations projected to have the largest numerical increases in employment between 2004 and 2014.”

Psychologists study the human mind and human behavior.   So it is more than idle curiosity to wonder what they study of love.  Very little, according to “Love Doctor” Leo Buscaglia.  In 1969, Buscaglia endured professional ridicule in order to begin an experimental class devoted to the study of love at a California university.

His students’ first major lesson about love was unexpected.  “Love has really been ignored by the scientists.  It’s amazing,” wrote Bascaglia.  “My students and I did a study.  We went through books in psychology.  We went through books in sociology.  We went through books in anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the word love.”

So it is today.  Standing in the bookstore of our local state university, reading through psychology textbooks, love is still absent from any professional consideration.

Holding Learning and Behavior, skimming chapter one on the psychology of learning and behavior, I note that students will study the spectrum of influences on human behavior:  external events, classical Pavlovian conditioning, habituation, operant conditioning schedules, punishment, stimulus control, imitation, modeling, choice and self control.  But nary one word about love.  Neither is love listed in the index.

The textbook Science and Human Behavior by B.F. Skinner is only slightly better.  Love appears in the index twice.   On page 162, love is likened to fear and anger…a person “is generally talking about predispositions to act in certain ways….the man ‘in love’ shows an increased tendency to aid, favor, be with, and caress and a lowered tendency to injure.”  On page 310, Skinner teaches that “…love might be analyzed as the mutual tendency of two individuals to reinforce each other, where the reinforcement may or may not be sexual.”

That’s it.  That’s the full consideration of the one emotion forceful enough to make the world go round.

In The Nature of Prejudice, the author actually writes a complete sentence about love.  “Why is it,” he asks, “that we hear so little about love – prejudice – the tendency to overgeneralize our categories of attachment and affection?”  This notion of “love-prejudice” pops up just one more time in his textbook that has six pages referenced in the index for sex and a whole section devoted to sexuality.

Sensing a pattern, I reached for the fourth and final psychology textbook, Psychology of Behavior.  Its eighteen chapters thoroughly cover human behavior: human consciousness, evolution, nervous cells and structure, psychopharmacology, methods of research, ethical issues, vision, audition, chemical senses, control and movement, sleep, reproductive behavior, emotion, memory, ingestive behavior, relational learning, schizophrenia, affective disorder, anxiety disorder, autistic disorder, hyperactivity disorder, stress disorder and drug abuse.

Love?  Not there.  But, checking the book’s index, if you want to know about sex, there is no end in sight: hormones, chromosomes, activational effects, gender development, sexual maturation, arousal, prefrontal cortex, hormonal control, human sex, sex of lab animals, neural control, sexual dimorphism, prenatal androgens, sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN), orientation, heredity…my fingers wore out just listing all the ways we have to study sex.

Love may make the world go round.  But when the world is sick from lack of love, it is the last thing our love doctors think to check.

If the academics miss the obvious, a humble woman with no desire to reach the pinnacle of professional greatness sees it all.  “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody,” said Mother Teresa, “I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

In the midst of plenty, we are a love sick world.

What does it say about the likelihood that we can recover from love sickness, if our most elite educators study more about our sexually dimorphic nucleus than about our ability to love one another?

What does it say about our future, if those who study to fill the exploding market of jobs for psychiatrists and psychology can memorize the psychopharmacology of modern drugs, but have only read two pages in their college text about love as a prejudice?

And what does it say about our children and their love future when we have saturated their world with so much of sexual orientations and so little of love?

“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody…”  We are love sick.  And we need a cure.

**************

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.                                                     Mother Teresa

 

December 10, 2004 – The Best Part of Snuggling

 See Archives for more past editorials.

Counterfeit Love

January 30, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Pushing through the door at Arby’s last night, a hastily written sign taped on the door caught my eye.  Too hungry to stop and read, I moved straight to the counter to place my order.  There, prominently taped to each cash register, were more of the handmade paper signs:  We will no longer accept $50 or $100 bills.

Of course, I had to ask.  “Why not?”

“We were getting too many counterfeit bills,” she told me.

Who hasn’t wondered at one time or another how easy it would be to make money?  It’s a lot harder than we would think.

In the first stages of the process, highly skilled engravers cut intricate designs into soft steel, known as the master-die.  Separate portions of the design…the portrait, the vignette, the ornamentation, and the lettering…are hand-cut.  In all, this begins a process of production that includes over 65 separate and distinct steps.

Of course, there’s an easier way.  Today, counterfeiting once again is on the rise due to the ease and speed with which large quantities of counterfeit currency can be produced using modern photographic and printing equipment.

While many consider counterfeiting a minor crime, it is actually a crime that can cripple a nation and its economy.  Counterfeiting of money is one of the oldest crimes in history. It was a serious problem during the 19th century when banks issued their own currency. At the time of the Civil War, it was estimated that one-third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit.

At that time, there were approximately 1,600 state banks designing and printing their own notes. Each note carried a different design, making it difficult to distinguish the 4,000 varieties of counterfeits from the 7,000 varieties of genuine notes.

The United States Secret Service is charged with investigating each and every counterfeiting case.  No matter how large or small, each counterfeiting case carries the serious consequences of prison time and/or fines.

With all of the law enforcement tools at their hands…surveillance, wire taps, computers, and more…the key to detecting a counterfeit bill lies not with the agent’s knowledge about the criminal.  He must start by developing a sophisticated knowledge of the real thing.

As the Secret Service website says, you must Know Your Money.  What does the real thing look like?  Whose picture should be on the bill?  Is the green a solid shade, or is it a mixture of cyan and yellow? Does the President’s face stand out from the background, or is it flat and lifeless?  Are the serial numbers uniformly spaced and aligned?

In fact, one website dedicated to helping you spot counterfeit currency offers this advice.  If you think you have a bad bill, lay it next to a bill you know is genuine.  Back and forth, looking from one bill to the next, real, fake…the best tool of detection is knowing the real deal.

This is advice that works for much more than paper money.  An intimate knowledge of the real deal can keep you from being defrauded with counterfeit coins, checks, stamps and Beanie Babies.  That’s right.

Again, another website, and more advice about separating the real from the fake…shoppers are coached.  “Get to know the real deal.”   Go to Beanie Baby shows, touch them, feel them, check out the edge of the tags, the points on the stars, the shine of the gold thread…in all…there are 17 ways to determine if you have a counterfeit “Baby.”

So it is with love.  Abstinence educators around the country tell the same sad story about our young people.  Teens are confused about sex because they are confused about love.   The Real Deal…a picture of love that lasts for a lifetime has been ripped from their culture, their movies and their music….and replaced with counterfeits.

Children are learning to embrace the counterfeit.  Teens today, working to build their place in a world of smaller broken families and relationships, are building their love based on images flashed at them on the big screen and pounded at them in their music.  And every counterfeit picture of love they see is a picture of sex.

If it’s true about money, it’s even more true about love.  While many consider counterfeiting love a minor crime, it is actually a crime that can cripple a nation and its people…. An intimate knowledge of the real deal can keep you from being defrauded with the counterfeit.

If it’s true about money, it’s even more true about our kids.  A real deal thousand dollar bill is worth a lot.  So are our kids. 

Post the signs.  It’s time to get serious.  We will no longer accept counterfeit love.

*************

 January 3, 2005 –  Teen Pregnancy: What’s the Problem?

See Archives for more past editorials.

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 2

January 23, 2006

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. [1Cor 13:4-7, NIV]

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Each wedding is a day of hope.  Hope stands on vows, solemnly made in front of all those we love and hold dear.  And vows are secured with a promise…to love, honor and cherish, in good times and bad, in sickness and health, till death we do part.

Love is at the center of this most special day.  A wedding album holds a history of promises made in pictures of love and perfection.

Pictures of love in the world abound.  Our husband kisses us goodbye in the morning.  A child climbs into our lap in the early morning hours.  We get a birthday card from an old college friend.  And huddled together on the beach, sharing hot chocolate, we watch the sun go down.

If love fails, it’s not for lack of knowing love when we see it.

If love fails, it must be for lack of committing ourselves to making it happen.

Love is patient.  Has there been a moment today when someone has offended us by taking too long in the grocery line?  Love has failed.

Love is kind.  Did we speed up to cut off a car crowding in front of us on the freeway?  Love has failed.

Love is not rude.  Do we enjoy telling our friend how we chewed out the insurance agent on the phone because he forgot to file our claim?  Love has failed.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.  Yet, how many reasons can we recite for being mad at Aunt Linda?  How many people will we tell?  And how long will we hold to our promise to never speak to her again?  Love has failed.

If love fails, it fails because we fail.  In spite of the people who slow us down, the speeding cars on the freeway, the forgetful insurance agents and the crazy family members we have to suffer…love fails because we fail to love.

The greatest misunderstanding of love in the modern world is our tendency to equate love with warm and cuddly feelings.  Perhaps mass marketing has added to the problem.  We have come to expect love to look like a Hallmark commercial, complete with soft music and sentimental tears.

But love is more than a pretty picture.  And love is more than a feeling.

Love…”is an action, an activity… Love is not a feeling,” wrote M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled. Describing love in detail, Peck taught, “True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed.  It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”

Published in 1978, his book sold over six million copies in North America alone and was translated into over 20 languages.  The 25th Anniversary Edition was released in 2003.  First described as a “new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth,” it broke with the sentimentality of the 60s.  “Love is as love does,” Peck wrote.  “Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage.”

The Road Less Traveled certainly tapped into the need of Americans to re-evaluate their values and relationships.  But its message was hardly a “new psychology of love.”

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?  [Mat 5:44-46, NIV]

If loving our neighbor is easy, then we haven’t stretched far enough.  In truth, love fails because we’re not up to the work of love.

But this is 2006.  And if we are dedicated to love, we are dedicated to work.  So here it is.  A job.  An assignment.

Who in your life is impossible to love?  And if it’s impossible, the good news…the great news… is that you have the power at hand to change the world, to make the impossible…possible.  You are only one decision away from love.

This week.  One decision.  Just one decision and one act of love to change the world.  Are we up to it?

Love is a learned phenomenon….if you don’t like where you’re at in terms of love, you can change it.                                                                — Leo Buscaglia

____________________________

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.  

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

*************

 January 9, 2006 – To Know Love When We See Love, Part 1

September 12, 2005 –  Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

See Archives for more past editorials.