Love and In Love - my new drug

I have been in love for - I am not sure how long. I am just about one year into dating this person I love.

Of course love with all its happiness and joys of being loved and accepted as you are requires of us a lot  of growth and growth is painful. It requires of us change because we have to shift from primarily looking out for ourselves and thinking about the other person.

Love essentially takes us from being selfish to being sacrificial. Would you die for a person? Maybe your quick answer is no. But when you love and truly love you know there is not even a question about it - you would die for someone... don't get me wrong "not die to have someone" but "die so that someone would live".

Here are some of the crazy things that love has got me doing.

1. I now care about the opinion of someone else about me. Of course previously it was - I am what I am ... take it or leave it. Now it is - I am what I am...please accept me for me
2. I want to commit in marriage - previously I loved my freedom in being single and I always believed I would be more useful to myself and the world this way. Now I want the whole deal... babies and all.
3. I have taken on my personality disorders - well I haven't gone to a psychologist for these but I am doing my best to keep my balance and gender erratic swings and NPD manifestations are on my plate of things to deal with
4. Well the rest is probably what you experience too - I want to be with her, talk to her(Airtel please introduce an okoa mapenzi tariff these phone usage is "astronomous") want to spend time with her, want to give her a wonderful life, want her body with every ounce of mine, I want to give her reasons for happiness

Anyway Love is really something - but as usual like with all my other encounters in life religion and faith, personality disorders and behaviour, work, family, school - I have a need to understand love intellectually and I have come up against the most interesting of facts ... that Love has no standard definition.

What I mean is no one has called it an action, an object, a feeling, a combination of feelings and emotions, a state of being. 

Everyone is clear on the effects of love on the human body. I particularly like this piece by Helen Fisher on "the brain in Love" at some point she calls love an addiction (question is an addiction to what? a behaviour? a substance?)

I am also listening and reading material on "Theology of the body" which is based on a series of lectures by John Paul II when he was a priest in Kracow and during his papacy - because I believe if I can go back to "Eden" then I may get answers.

and this

Finally the most beautiful material I have found on love is this piece by Kahlil Gibran the poet in which he gives love a persona

Confession and the Pool of Siloam

Yesterday I went for confession...

Okay - quick primer. Confession is one of the seven sacraments. Sacraments in the Catholic church are outward signs  (symbolic, physical, action and rites) instituted by Jesus that God uses to give Grace to the partaker. Grace is a share in God's life. In confession we receive pardon for sins (sins are acts against love of God, self or neighbor) and the grace to stay true to our intention of not sinning again.

Of course we do sin again and again and confession and the Eucharist are the two sacraments that a Catholic receives over and over again (anointing of the sick too once in a while if repeatedly sick to the  point of death)

Anyway this article is not a catechisis - I wish it were. It was about me going for confession.

So I went to Holy Family Basilica and I was so impressed by the number of us different ages different sexes all lining up. There were only two priests available which is good considering some parts of the world have to make do with visiting priests. So each priest had two confessionals and there was a queue to each.

So being the Nairobians we are - we are all queued up in front of the two confessionals and it was interesting to see queue dynamics at a confessional. So someone would discretely take out their mobile phone glance at (I assume the time), crane his neck or step out of line to check out the other queue and switch to the queue that seemed to be moving faster. I had my phone out all the time (I promise I was not checking out the time - I had my confession on phone on an app called Laudate so I kept going over it over and over again)

I was also guilty of switching to the other half of our queue only to find some of the faithful lined up there had decided to queue while sited - d**n oh boy another sin I just cursed... of course having moved you could not move back and a single look at the eyes of the person who took your place tells you clearly you might invoke another sin from him if you go back to your original place.

Anyway the whole episode reminded me of the gospel story of the Jesus curing the blind beggar at the pool of Siloam. So the beggar waited for his chance to jump in the pool when the angel touched the water but someone always beat him to it. Anyway Jesus came and healed the man who had been ill for 38 years John 5:1-17.

So here we all stand at today's pool of confession all anxious to jump in - maybe for the therapeutic effect of sharing your commissions and omissions in confidence - maybe for the chance to start again ... but most of all because when Jesus asks "Do you want to be well?" the answer we give is YES.