Critical Reflections
Excerpts from Arthur Thormann’s book called Critical Reflections
Preface
I renamed my first version of Conclusions Volume III to Human Traits & Follies, and I am renaming the second version of Conclusions Volume III to Critical Reflections. These titles better defines the contents of the books. However, I am still planning to write a third volume of Conclusions.
The notion of love kept recurring to me as a worthwhile topic. I was obsessed by the idea that love is everywhere, even where hate exists, because people who hate simply love to hate. Therefore, I decided to write about love and hate relationships. Can you think of a better topic for the main reason of our existence? Without love, we may as well not exist, because we would be no better off than a plant in the field, although plant lovers claim that plants also flourish more with love from them.
I have previously covered the subject love against hate in my book Thoughts in a Maze, but some of it is worth repeating. Love has many different meanings — even a dictionary comparison between love and loverelated words will tell us that. You have different feelings of love for your wife or husband, for your father and mother, for your brother and sister, for your uncle and aunt, for your cousins, for your teachers, for your employers, for your dog or cat, for your neighbors, for your friends and foes, for yourself, for your car or bicycle, for your trips to the beaches or mountains, and so on. Do all of these different feelings of love fit your dictionary’s definition? Of course not!
Suppose we take the Bible instruction, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Lev 19:18); what, exactly, does it mean? Not only do we have a wide range of intensity for love, but we also have the questionable feeling for self-love. Some folks may not love themselves at all, in which case the instruction to love their neighbors as themselves may not mean much. Another instruction from the Bible, “Love ye your enemies …” (Lk 6:35), is also hard to define. If you take the various different feelings of love from the first paragraph above, which of these feelings, if any, would fit the feeling of love you have for your enemy?
Even if your enemy hates you, there may be a way of converting him or her through love. I have had such an experience. Some time back, I gave regular reports to a group, and one group member found fault with everything I reported — not just fault, but he was outright mean about it and to me. His criticism was so unreasonable that it led me to the conclusion that he was my enemy. At about the same time, I was reading a book by Karl Menninger, M.D., called Love against Hate, and I decided to put Mr. Menninger’s advice to the test. Lo and behold, it worked.
Enemies, bad neighbors, or unloving spouses, it is hard to love any of them in the biblical sense. Nevertheless, whoever can accomplish it is better off for it. Love definitely causes different juices to flow in our bodies than hate. I would not be at all surprised to find out how many sicknesses can be traced to feelings of hate; conversely, I would not be at all surprised to find out how many sicknesses were healed by feelings of love.
Those who find they are unable to love should, at least, try to neutralize their feelings of hate.
With this idea in mind, the topic of love literally provides an author limitless material for a manuscript, as my readers will soon realize, since much of our experiences are founded in love/hate relationships.
Nevertheless, since the concept of love is manifold, the material available for a manuscript is also manifold, and the question arises: what is the greatest and purest form of love known to us? I believe it is the love that Jesus Christ spoke of and demonstrated to us on the cross at Golgotha. In the same vein, it is the love that God decided to bestow on us, by allowing His beloved Son to suffer and die for us. Let me clarify the latter.
When Jesus Christ decided to die for us on the cross at Golgotha, he displayed his human side for a few seconds, calling out “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”*
This question puzzled me as a young man, and Victor Lesley Webb, a good friend and father figure, explained to me that God, who abhorred sin, could not look upon Jesus, who, at that time, had taken on the sin of the entire human race.
I have since that time concluded that this is not a probable explanation, because an almighty God would not shy away from looking at sin, no matter how enormous the sin is. A better explanation is God’s love for the human race.
After all, God could not favor His love for His Son at the expense of His love for the human race by saving Jesus from the pain Jesus underwent on the cross. Saving Jesus from His pain would have meant condemning the entire human race for its sins, which was Jesus’s mission to take on in order to save the human race. So, when Jesus cried out to God on the cross, He temporarily forgot His and God’s priorities. Thus, the enormity of Jesus’s love for the sinful human race was matched by God’s love for the human race; were it not so, God could have easily relieved Jesus from His pain on the cross.
Jesus’s and God’s love is an extreme type of love, of course. We humans are not capable of such an enormous godly love. We are, however, quite capable of displaying various forms of human love, and hate, and this book critically reflects on some of these.
For the front cover, I chose a sculpture of a naked woman, to depict the exposed love of human beings, and to emphasize that we leave as naked as we came.**
Arthur O.R. Thormann
July 2016
*KJV Matthew 27:46 — Note: some translators declare that the words should read “My God, my God, for this I was kept?” However, the differing translation does not alter my conclusion.
**See Ecclesiastes 5:15
