Eat more fruit to be healthy!

VENIDA DEL ESPIRITU SANTO – THE COMING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

(By: Karla Wagener on Pentecost, May 31, 2020).

   ¨What is Love¨ - A song by Haddaway

¨America, Love it or leave it¨, has often been repeated over the years.  I left the United States more than 30 years ago not because I did or did not love it, but because I needed a new way of life.  I was not totally conscious of what I was doing and only through many years of toil and sacrifice can I begin to understand just what my new life signified.

Love is quite a word!  Surely, we do not know truly what it is or experience it fully.

Reflecting back, and witnessing the direction the USA has taken, I think I probably love it and have more compassion now than I ever did in youth when I felt perplexed and full of questionings of existence.

When I left the USA in 1987, I thought or imagined I would stay in Argentina for about 6 months.  Conditions made the time turn into years.  My children began school.  We suffered economic, family and personal complications.

People say many things about love.  I think maybe love is a picture or image rather than a definition.  It is an image that changes and develops with different situations.  Another word for love is care or charity.  Others are tenderness, intimacy, fondness, warmth.  It is what fills what is needed and it remains after all other essentials diminish.  It endures indefinitely.

I feel for what is going on in the USA recently.  Since childhood I have been aware of many mistakes in certain attitudes it has such as alienation, denial, materialism, dominance over other countries, a certain rigidness as a system.  Of course, it also has many positive qualities also!  I came across a priest in a Mass in a trip I made to Maryland in 2012.  He told me, ¨There is a lack of a true Spirituality in the USA¨.  He talked about the people finding it difficult to be truly spiritual because of the dependence on material objects.

In my particular case, it was not so much a question of love, but of need.  I needed something I did not find in America.  Some kind of sociability or connection or perhaps identification I did not find in such a structured, unyielding environment.  It is easier to analyze from a distance, after the passing of much time.  Perhaps the word is spontaneity.  Spontaneity is an adjective, coming or resulting from a natural impulse or tendency without effort or premeditation; natural and unconstrained; unplanned.

Some synonyms for spontaneity are improvisation, impulse, inclination, will, tendency, whim, naturalness, ease, uninhibitedness, unrestraint, lightheartedness, abandonment. Spirit is also a synonym for spontaneity.

During my adolescence in the 1960´s a theatre teacher told a group of us that ¨the definition of spontaneity was an adequate response to a new situation and a new response to an old repeated situation¨.

At about that time, people in my neighborhood and especially my 9 siblings thought I was a Hippy!  They branded me.  Yes, I was a sort of rebel, but a rebel with a cause.  Justice and humanity!  Love!  Caring!  Peace not War!  I did not identify myself with the Hippy movement at all.

Looking back I now realize that I was or should have been branded ¨Catholic¨ (which means ¨universal¨.  I was not a practicing Catholic at that time, but I held those specific, detailed values within.  What I had studied and lived in my childhood remained intact, even as I questioned Institutions. It seems almost comical to me now that I have somehow reached a greater, deeper success and favorable outcome in life by letting go of many material things and discovering spirituality.  It is not a matter of where we live physically, but that we discover what is most important and be at terms with and be able to love those we are with.

This discovery is of the greatest importance and is such a blessing.  Perhaps it is something like a ¨place¨ or ¨image¨ within one´s own inner being, discovering love and spirit.  It can happen anywhere, and perhaps when least expected! Since today is Pentecost I would like to share it and hope to help others discover this promised experience.  The Spirit comes and goes, like the wind, like the smell of a delicious perfumed oil, like the flame from a fire burning, like the brightness of your lovely eyes shining out benevolence, like spontaneous adequate change in reaction to what is old and also what is new!