Truth and love are the two primary opposites in life. Each other’s antagonists. Everything else is derivative and incidental…
The other day, while writing some articles for the coming week, I posted a status on Facebook. It read, Love heavenly love. God’s deadliest weapon. It was an excerpt from a piece I was writing on death and rebirth.
A couple of hours later a friend wrote a comment. ‘Might be good if Cupid missed?’ he asked.
My reply was short. ‘He often does, and the carrot turns into a stick.’
I went back to work, but the idea was now nagging at me.
I decided to taken a break and explore the subject a little further.
Here’s the result, uncut…
Cupid often misses, and the carrot turns into a stick because the endgame is too good to miss out on, and too precious to ignore.
And that’s concerning only cupid’s love. There’s also the love of kin, of friends, of cause, of country, of God. There’s love given and offered, expected and denied, thwarted and used as currency – inflated, deflated, devalued, destroyed – love leveraged – love that hurts when it doesn’t work and love that hurts when it does – love too strong to bear, love too strong to understand, shaping the entire world – all this as opposed to truth, which is the devil’s deadliest weapon, shaping the world in a similar but opposing way.
Ah, truth, uncompromising and unadulterated. It denies love just as easily as love denies truth in turn. It promotes life as effectively as love can, and it destroys everything as efficiently. It sets us free or casts us out and leaves us to die in oblivion. It invites scorn, jealousy and hatred, or, conversely, dowses us in admiration and awe, respect and dignity. Truth is love’s most dedicated rival.
Still, sometimes they’re able to coexist, these two, briefly, but with great results. When they come together, they work beautifully. Miracles happen. The world is a wonderful place.
When they don’t – more often than not – something gives.
Alpha and Omega
Truth and love are the two primary opposites in life. Each other’s antagonists. Everything else is derivative and incidental. Hatred, anger, fear, all of them permutations of love gone awry, of violated emotion, of deceit (violated truth) and malice (the intention to kill love) and evil (the lack of empathy for all things loving; the dance of one kind of love on the bones of another kind of love; the joy that comes from love destroyed) …
Everything boils down to passion versus reason. Love is passion, truth is reason. Somewhere between the two, amid a colossal heave and ho, lies wisdom.
In Part 2 I’ll say more about the subject in terms of God and the devil…