The Golden Rules of Love - Post 1

Post 1 in a series created for a gift book I am writing called "The Golden Rules of Love, Life, and Meaning"

THIS THING WE CALL...LOVE

“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” -Voltaire

Real love is the most sought after prize in all human endeavor. To understand it requires a lifetime of pondering, practice, and patience. Seekers and those who possess the quality of heart and soul thank God every day for this thing called love. We have witnessed its touch bring renewed hope to the disheartened, pleasure to the eye, a quickening to the soul; for love sustains mankind.

It leads to commitment, then marriage, on to families and as such creates the social bond we call community. It is The Dalai Lama of Tibet who has said: Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.

Love is the glue to every worldly society for it ultimately calls the mother and father home to nurture the rising generation, to hold it together.

True love beckons the brother, sister, friend to give, serve, lift, and care for one another. It calls out to a comrade to risk everything to save another. Of all virtues, true love is the greatest.

No other emotion so powerfully affects us day to day. Love feeds the starving, clothes the naked and cares for the poor, homeless, widowed and fatherless. Love, like fire, burns at different degrees in all of us. The most hardened criminal can be touched by it, given the right mix of feelings and compassion.

I first started reading on the philosophy of love in 1974 when a college student, I found professor of philosophy and comparative religion, Truman Madsen's words. This simple phrase has stayed with me all these years:“Love is divine fire, with a large F.”

Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato said: “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”

And the eighteenth century sage, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin put it eloquently in free style verse;

The day will come,
after harnessing space, the winds,
the tides and gravity
we shall harness, for God, the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time
in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.


Love.
Written of.
Spoken about.
Reviled and reveled in.
Played out on screen and stage.

Philosophers have written tomes to fill libraries on it. The religious have enjoined it to the grand purposes of the Gods. Nations have fought wars in the name of it, and men have risked their lives to seek but a taste of its sweet and addictive flavor.

When “making love,” in the vernacular of the day, a man and women may reach the zenith of life’s pleasures through physical intimacy. In a committed marriage there is rarely anything to compare with the feeling physical intimacy may bring. Because it is done in the spirit of loving their companion in every way, it strengthens and bolsters the marriage, and increases the pleasure of the experience.

If marriage is sacred, then love making is sacred...

Happiness does not come cheaply, and perhaps there’s the rub. We often find in our present condition that the luster of fidelity has faded. Some film and publishing has elevated sexual intimacy alone to the position where real love had always reigned. As long as the uncommitted “hero” is the one engaged in the “love making” it is seen as a sweet and never ending thing.

When the theatre curtain falls and the lights come on, we awaken and are brought to reality again - life is real, earnest, with commitments to be made and kept.

Is a kiss prelude or postlude? Is the touch of skin meant to be used or shared? What if the Gods arranged sexuality (as I suppose it is) to not only be for propagation of the species but absolutely fulfilling and to be anticipated?

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." -Ingrid Bergman

Sexual intimacy in the committed path, the path of action that blends the passions with the “harnessed energies of love,” as De Chardin put it, works to bond and build and never destroy.

Do I sound like a prude or unrealistic? I'm a man...quite normal and have given this some heart-felt consideration for decades. The bottom line? I love romance and...

I believe sexual intimacy to be sacred, and "love-making" is equally had in the touch of a hand, a kiss, and emtions wrapped in faithfulness; all this to be enjoyed most fully, not the other way around.

An agent and film producer in Hollywood, once considering one of my books for a film project, came to the conclusion, "Hollywood wants hard love stories James, not soft. Sorry."

"I didn't know love was hard," I answered.

Love is a verb and a noun. To explore its dimensions in literature, song, dance, worship, art and service, is to touch the hand of the Divine Creator of the Universe and partner with him in creating a piece of heaven on earth.

Love is vital...food to the soul.

It is an elixir to the spirit.

It quenches spiritual thirst and puts a quicker beat into the heart of one experiencing its taste. The human heart so affected sends life giving fluids at a more rapid rate, bursting through and to every part of one’s being.

To love truly is to be truly alive. It excites and stimulates creativity. It is loud, happy, noisy at times.

It is also the expression of silence in deference to the bereaved.

It is reverent awe at the realization that there exists a benevolent power greater than us all to comfort us in mourning.

It is the joyful sound of children at innocent play.

It is renewal at the first sounds of birth.

It is the final kiss at the brink of death of one beloved.

It is the courage of a soldier for his comrade, and a fellow man offering safety to one he does not know.

It is the flower from the garden to brighten the table and the rose on the grave as if in soliloquy petals have a voice and can whisper for the deceased to hear the word; “I love you.”

...and it is the feeling coming from an unseen world that the deceased love you still.

The Holy Bible says; “God is love.”

Men have fashioned idols to gods they have named for love. If man alone were the final authority his very testimonial in written form and art spanning six millennia of the recorded history of worship suggest he had enthroned love as the ultimate quality divine.

And if divine, love is more than a special way of feeling...

Love is a way of being.

James M Pratt

EASTER 2010 - Hope, Happiness, New Beginnings

On another Easter Sunday long ago, my family posed for this photo on Garfield Ave in Southgate, CA. You may guess the little boy in the front row teasing his older sister? Yep, moi.

Life was a long journey to be enjoyed, filled with adventure, love, perhaps do like my father had done; save America in another war worth sacrifices...

NOW... It has been an adventure, and filled with love, sorrow, pain, fear, freedom, service, learning, loss, fulfillment, and pleasure. The totality of it all which I look for to sum it up? Happiness.

EASTER provides a day of reflection and new beginnings. If one word comes to mind most readily it is hope. Hope for...?

New life, new beginnings, gratitude for the meaning of a risen Christ for believer and non-believer. For hope is what starts the journey, one step in front of the other toward faith, growth, fulfillment, and finally arriving to what a sometimes elusive word sums up: "Happiness."

Sometimes life's road is strewn with boulders, and other times you find you must simply fight adverities and adversaries for cherished dreams. Which brings me to where I've been, what I'm doing, and why I care about the freedom to "hope" which Easter always resurrects. Bear with a political observation. The reason for making it will become apparent...

"Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness:" This phrase from the Declaration of Independence was wrongly quoted by US Congressman Hare of Illinois two days ago as the reason he voted for a nationalized medicine bill, which "mandates" Federal controls, purchasing upon threat of penalty to states and individuals, expressly contrary to the spirit of freedoms implied and expressed by our two founding documents.

He claimed the phrase came from the US Constitution which "I don't really care about." Here is a man who can't identify the difference between our nation's founding documents, and doesn't "care" (his words.) Here is a man whose party represents many good and loyal Americans who do "care." Here is a man willing to "force" a bankrupting concept (2.5 trillion dollars to an 8 trillion national debt)upon a people which in all opinion polls overwhelmingly rejects "force" as a road to American "happiness." I could go on with statistics and actual Constitutional law to show how far we have slipped into near "ruler" mentality. Not the point right now.

The point? Our spiritual and religious rights are inexorably linked to documents which a "ruling party" insists are not as important as the people their decisions will serve. This is backwards.

Saving the Constitution: It has become apparent that if any of the hopes and dreams of the little family in the 1957 photo have been realized, they have been based only upon freedoms our countrymen, women and wise founders sacrificed many years and lives for.

With so many doing so much, including giving even their lives for American freedoms, "could I do less?" I have asked myself. I have determined this is a fight and stand which, should I avoid in order to simply "enjoy" private peace-filled moments and my own happiness, I would later regret.

I've been "missing in action" in these "Straight From the Heart" blog posts for four months as I pursued publishing, distribution, and alliances needed for my business which is engaged in the fight for the heart and soul of America.

As publisher of the #1 Amazon bestseller THE FIVE THOUSAND YEAR LEAP with foreword by Glenn Beck, and the emerging bestselling digital software library titled, US CONSTITUTION COACH KIT, I've been buried in leadership and administration details.

Writing is my first love. I thank all my friends who have been fans of my books, posts and musings. I promise to return weekly now with insights, opinion, observations, and encouragement for life I hope will inspire the reader. I will not focus upon much in politics here, but send links to blogs on other pages where I have been invited to contribute my thoughts about political times and items of constitutional, cultural, and national interest.

Here, at Straight from the Heart I will continue to pursue my heartfelt goal; messages of inspiration and encouragement. Which brings me full circle to...

EASTER leaves me no choice but to declare unequivocally this: I believe in Christ.

I offer this because it provides me HOPE in what his life and messages offer.

HAPPINESS has not been the product of a painless life nor an easy path. It is a secret that anyone, anywhere can learn in spite of the long day of trouble they endure.

New Beginnings: Between "little boy" in the photo and newly minted "senior citizen" the freedom to believe as I desire and act accordingly, has produced satisfaction and still yields excitement to achieve new goals, with the attending "joie de vivre."

I invite you to join me. No matter where you may be in life, whatever may be your dreams, have hope, and never give up on life, our country, God, and the design and purpose for our existence; happiness.

James M. Pratt

Next Week: "Opposites Attract - Why happiness is aways right around the corner."