From Thomas Merton's essay "Love and Solitude," contained in the collection entitled "Love and Living":
The power of genuine love is so deep and so strong that it cannot be deflected from
its true aim even by the silliest of wrong ideas. When love is alive and mature
in a person, it does not matter if he has a false idea of himself and of life:
love will guide him according to its own inner truth and will correct his ideas
in spite of him. That may be dangerous, but the danger is nothing new and the
human race has lived with it for a million-odd years. The trouble is, though,
that our wrong ideas may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives.
Once we love, our love can change our thinking. But wrong thinking can inhibit
love. Overemphasis on the aspects of need and fulfillment, and obsessions which
encourage a self-conscious and narcissistic fixation on one's own
pleasure, can easily blight or misdirect the growth of love. That is why the
advertising imagery which associates sexual fulfillment with all the most
trivial forms of satisfaction-in order to separate the buyer from his dollar-creates
a mental and moral climate that is unfavorable to genuine love. Unconsciously
the power that should go into creative and positive love for the other person
is being short-circuited by images of infantile oral fulfillment and other
narcissistic symbols. The lover then becomes the beautiful glowing icon of
self-satisfaction, the desirable, slick, and infinitely happy package, rather
than the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of
the beloved. Even the advertising images of those beatified couples, for whom
the years of early middle age are an unending ball, do not convince us of the
reality of love: they merely enshrine the cool and consummated deal that our
society believes in with superstitious reverence.
What are we going to do about it? Well, for one thing, we can be aware of these
immature and inadequate ideas. We do not have to let ourselves be dominated by
them. We are free to think in better terms. Of course, we cannot do this all by
ourselves. We need the help of articulate voices, themselves taught and
inspired by love. This is the mission of the poet, the artist, the prophet.
Unfortunately, the confusion of our world has made the message of our poets
obscure and our prophets seem to be altogether silent-unless they are devoting
their talents to the praise of toothpaste.
Meanwhile, as our media become more sophisticated and more subtle, there is no reason why
they should not also create for us a better and saner climate of thought-and present us with a less fallacious fantasy world of symbolic
fulfillments.
There is no reason except, of course, that it is easier to make money by exploiting
human weakness!
Running around town the other day, flipping radio channels to find
something to dampen the embers of road rage threatening to flicker into flames,
I heard a conservative talk show host express wonder at how parents
could hope to counteract the influence of the popular culture on their
children. As he put it, children swim all day in "the cesspool that is
our popular culture." I wonder about that myself. I certainly
don't have the answers, and wouldn't dream of advising parents,
inasmuch as I'm not one.
On the other hand, parents could do worse than focus on first things first:
"to be aware of these immature and inadequate ideas" and to
realize that neither they, nor their children, need to be dominated by them. On
a deeper and perhaps more fundamental level, parents could spend time
contemplating what constitutes "genuine love"--the
"agape" that Pope Benedict XVI so eloquently addressed in his
encyclical "Deus Caritas Est"--and what influences of our popular culture, in
fact, of our entire way of life, produce "wrong ideas" that
"may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives." That will be a difficult task, subject to understandable bouts of
rationalization, denial, and all the other roadblocks we throw in the way of
the Truth and in defense of the immature and inadequate physical and emotional
gratifications served by our immature and inadequate ideas.
I may not know kids, but I know about "wrong ideas" and the way to
obtain and sustain them, and I understand the ceaseless struggle required to
overcome them. That said, Merton's on to something about the power of
genuine love and its self-correcting power. I see it working, hour by hour,
day by day, even in the seemingly worst of us. Even in what appear
to be hopeless cases.