Are you willing to forgive?

Posted: 19 February 2013

As human beings we are an emotionally fragile bunch. That however is not a bad thing. Indeed, it is our emotional state that most readily separates us from the animal kingdom. We perceive love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear, and we can deliver those positive or negative emotions to others in the way we act. These negative emotions when given or received, hurt, and can hurt very deeply. The old school yard response to bullies runs, ’sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’. It may be a cute rhyme but it’s not true. What affects us most deeply is not the physical insults that come our way but those which offend us on a personal level. To have a trusted friend betray us hurts. To have a sibling insult another sibling hurts. These hurts are very real and they do not easily dissipate.

Society has some plan as to how to deal with physical insults. Courts and prisons are full of people who have caused physical hurt to another in some way. This is not the same with emotional hurt. Sometimes we will be initially unaware that our words and actions (or our response to those words) have offended another. Even those who are most careful may still at some point offend another person. There is no shortage of friendships and families that have broken down because deliberate or indeliberate offence has occurred. These delicate situations are not easy to resolve because all parties may, to some extent, have hurt another by their actions, choices or words. Recall the parable of the Prodigal son who offended his father by taking his inheritance to indulge in a wasted life. In time he returned truly sorry for his actions and his father forgave him but the one person who could not forgive was the older brother who had remained at home always faithful. In the end, by his anger, the older brother became as guilty as the younger.

The reason rifts do not get resolved is because too many of us feel justified in our positions of hurt or anger at another. People can spend a lifetime explaining the precise way in which they have suffered offence, and this may well be true, but at that point there are only two options. One can remain convinced of the need for the other person to reform and thus remain hurt and angry forever, or make a conscious decision to forgive. Now as soon as people hear about forgiveness they get specific ideas of what that means, for example, ‘I am happy to forgive as long as…’, or, ‘we can only move forward when…’. This is not genuine healing forgiveness. Forgiveness in the truest sense is a highly radical proposition, one not known well by a neo pagan society. Forgiveness involves an unconditional all embracing love of the other regardless of what offence, hurt or anxiety has been given us. This type of forgiveness involves taking our gaze from the other onto our own lives to examine where we may have given offence. It is rare that one person is completely innocent while the other is completely guilty.

True forgiveness brings about a love that is patient, kind and rich in mercy. Even if we are truly the innocent one, forgiveness will be quick to turn the other cheek. Those who follow the Christian faith will recognise the ancient petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. Here it seems clear that personal forgiveness from God is completely dependent on our willingness to unreservedly forgive others, and be happy about that forgiveness. We must not remain thinking that our forgiveness makes us a better person than the one who we have forgiven. If we remain as the righteous older brother in the story of the prodigal son, we cannot say we have forgiven. If we do not acknowledge that our actions may have offended another, we cannot say we have forgiven. What we are too often looking for is a judge and jury, we want to have our story heard and be told who is guilty and innocent. This sort of mentality will never find peace because mercy is always greater than justice. The person who spends his life looking for justice will always be hurt and never have the opportunity to be truly happy. So go on, in this New Year, reach out in true forgiveness and see your life transformed.

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Men and Wedding Planning

Posted: 18 November 2012

I am getting married at the end of the year to a lovely woman named Jane, and so my life in these last five months has involved an inordinate number of decisions around the height of cakes, the thickness of paper and the width of rings. I have also been informed on numerous occasions, by a wide variety of people, that the wedding is Jane’s ‘special day’ and that all major decisions, including what I will be wearing on the day, belong to her. Thankfully Jane has all along seen our wedding as a joint effort but this very common idea, that the wedding is a day for brides, needs some questioning.

While I am certainly pro-marriage I am not so sure that I am pro-wedding. I do not like the way in which the burgeoning wedding industry has taken the ideas of fidelity and self-giving love and associated them with make-up trials, chair covers and expensive cars. Interestingly the rise of the wedding industry and the amount of money spent is almost in direct correlation with the fall in the understanding of the nature and purpose of marriage.

My ideas about the nature of the wedding industry were confirmed when Jane and I attended a Bridal Expo with everything on show from jewellery to bonbonnieres to teeth whitening and even fitness training. One of the stalls was promoting a new wedding planning app in which the couple enters the basic details about their wedding to receive information showing the approximate cost of the wedding, according to industry averages. We had a go and filled out the few questions asked: date of wedding, style of wedding, number of guests etc. We were informed in no uncertain terms that our wedding, with 150 guests at the reception, was going to cost $105,936.09! This included $20,000 in outfits, $4500 in decorations (including $550 of balloons), $42,000 at the reception and $25,000 of pre-wedding expenses. Maybe this is the ‘industry average’ for a wedding, but if so, we all need to take a good hard look at ourselves and ask when exactly it became acceptable to spend more than a year’s wages on an event that is going to take less than a full day.

Now that I can speak from ‘within’ the world of wedding planning I can report that this is a world that has become overly feminised to the extent that male input is almost considered to be in the way. I assure you that wedding expos would not exist in their scope and size if men were playing a more substantial role in offering opinion. When one particular sex is solely responsible for weddings we find an imbalance in the end result. At one end, with women in charge, we find the costly princess-for-a-day model. At the other end, with men in charge, we see the disastrous results in TV shows such as Don’t tell the Bride.

While it is obvious that men and women are different this difference is meant to complement one another. Life is a not a competition to see which sex is most physically strong (that would be men) or which sex best nurtures children (that would be women). When men and women work together there is a wonderful balance. Where a husband might be happy to eat dinner every night straight out of a pizza box, it is the feminine charm of his wife that will civilise him and help him to see the role of a serviette. Where a wife might like to go shopping every weekend and continue to stock the house with ornaments that only exist to be dusted, it is the masculine practicality of her husband that stops her turning their home into a museum.

I am not blaming the many women who have taken over all aspects of wedding planning. Their leadership is often the necessary result of men who have scoured away like mice only wanting to know what date and time to turn up at the church. Just last week one newly married man was telling me proudly how he had left his fiancé to plan everything, as if this was some act of virtue! Both men and women need to embrace their roles in working with one another and using their natural gifts which at the end of the day will benefit not only wedding planning but life in general.

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Same-Sex Marriage…Ending Discrimination?

Posted: 16 September 2012

It is amazing the way that the same-sex marriage debate has taken such a strangle hold on discussion and commentary in Western society. Who would have thought that in the space of just a few years popular opinion could swift to such a degree that to simply hold marriage as the union of a man and a woman could be labeled as intolerant? Yet this is where we are at.

One recent move for a change in legislation has come from Tasmania where a bill to legalise same-sex marriage was introduced into the Parliament with Premier Lara Giddings imploring the members of the House to “open their hearts and minds to remove this last bastion of discrimination”.

Now if there is a buzz word in the same-sex marriage debate it is most definitely ‘discrimination’. In the 21^st century it would be better to be accused of anything rather than be found to be discriminatory. Yet we seem to have forgotten what the word actually means and that each of us discriminate every day of our lives.

Discrimination is the act of making a distinction and choosing between differences. From choosing chicken over ham on your sandwich, to the government deciding that the aged pension will be given at 67 instead of 65; these are discriminations. Without the ability to discriminate, that is the ability to state that one thing is not another thing, we could not have a democratic society. A musical note only has value because of the silence that exists before and after that note, if we were to label the silence as unfair discrimination against sound and remove it, there would only be an ongoing noise.

So yes, upholding marriage as the union of one man and one woman is discrimination because it says that this particular relationship has certain qualities that others do not have. Marriage discriminates against children, widows, those in defacto relationships, people with a same-sex attraction and all those who for whatever reason are not married. However this discrimination says nothing about the value of those individuals, it simply says that they are not in the institution that is called marriage.

One marriage equality website boldly proclaims that, “Denying anyone the right to marry because of gender or sexuality is simply not fair”, but the reason that society is involved in the business of marriage has nothing to do with love, romance or even fairness. Society concerns itself with marriage because it is the normal means by which the next generation is conceived, born and nurtured into responsible citizens. Secular society has no more business legislating the living arrangements of men and women with a same-sex attraction than it does legislating that every citizen must dress in a particular colour according to the season.

There is of course unjust discrimination which involves making decisions against a person based on something such as their race or religion rather than individual merit. That however is very different to stating that because a person practices the Christian faith they are discriminating against those of the Islamic faith. We need to be very careful when it comes to flying the flag of discrimination. Just because we find ourselves outside a particular situation we might like to be in, does not mean we are being unfairly discriminated against.

What is more accurately behind the push for same sex marriage is the desire to declare that the marital love of a man and woman is exactly the same as the proposed marital love of two men or two women. Both heterosexual and homosexual couples might share similar emotional feelings but what gives marriage its unchangeable uniqueness is the sexual union. Marriage declares that a particular man and woman have made the free choice to engage in sexual union with only the other. And that union is naturally open to bringing forth life (whether or not it actually does is another matter). This is the difference that cannot be changed by legislation.

The push for same-sex marriage is part of the agenda to declare that there are no differences in society. It is a push to state that our maleness and our femaleness are irrelevant. However our sex is foundational to us understanding who we are and how we fit in the world. These differences are not problems of discrimination but signs of a unique complementarity. Government may succeed in legislating same-sex marriage but it will be a fruitless law to gain the popular vote. Legalising same-sex marriage would be as meaningless as legislating that day and night were the same.

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The Useless People in Our Lives

Posted: 31 August 2012

I was scrolling through Facebook this week and I saw the following message; “KEEP people in your life that truly love you, motivate you, encourage you, inspire you, enhance you & make you happy. If you have people who do NONE of the above, let them go.” These sort of short inspirational messages are all over the internet and I have posted up a few of them myself. However as I read this one I found myself wondering what I should do with the people in my life who didn’t love me or motivate me or encourage me or inspire me or enhance me or even make me happy. And what if these same people did not motivate or inspire anyone? What if these people were a drain on me, their families and on the whole society?

It is important to surround ourselves with people who are going to encourage and inspire us. After all we become a reflection of the company we keep. If we spend our time with those who live to get drunk and party then we will end up doing the same. If we keep the company of those who strive for higher ideals then we will begin to strive for those same ideals.

It would be hard to get up every morning for an entire lifetime if there was never anyone to pat us on the back and say ‘you’re doing well, keep going’. At times we need encouraging and sometimes we encourage others. This is the story of good friendships, each person looks out for the other and when either one is struggling the other is there to pick them up.

However we might add another category of people in our life and that is those who are always a bit of a drain on us. These people are always down, always needy and they probably have no real prospects of making something noteworthy of their life. They may not be able to work, they may never marry, they may always be sick or they may just generally not ‘fit in’.

The reality is though our world is made up of a multitude of people from the strong and the successful to the unloved and those perceived to be ‘useless’. Throughout history various people and ideologies have tried to remove the useless from society and it continues to this day. It is estimated that China has approximately 35 million more males than females due to deliberate male sex selection. Have you ever wondered why you see less children with Down’s Syndrome these days? That is because 90 per cent of them are aborted when their parents receive a prenatal diagnosis of the condition.

Admittedly it can be difficult to embrace those who will make our life harder, but the mark of any of us is how we embrace the weak and those whom no one else will love. Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples in very explicit terms that to love the hungry, the sick and the lonely was to love him and to ignore the hungry, the sick and the lonely was to ignore him and thus salvation. This pursuit of such ‘useless’ people is what continues to make Mother Teresa of Calcutta an example of virtue to Christian, Hindu and Atheist.

As good as it is that we are all willing to open our wallets to the starving in Africa and the Tsunami victims in Indonesia I think the test of who we are is found much closer to us. It is in that friend from school who still calls us every week even though he has nothing to say. It is in our meddlesome aunt who lives alone with no one to talk too. It is in that person we have lunch with each month even though they probably get more out of it than we do. The truth is these are the very encounters that define us.

When the rich young Pier Giorgio Frassati died in 1925, it was the poor of Turin that packed his funeral in honour of the life he had secretly given in their service. It is good to surround ourselves with those who love, motivate and encourage us. But let us never dismiss or forget those who cannot and will not be able to offer us these things. The ‘rejects’ of society deserve as much friendship as the next person. For it is only by the undeserved grace of God that we find ourselves not in that category.

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Why Eat at the Dinner Table?

Posted: 24 June 2012

Where did your family eat dinner last night? In front of the TV? In the car on the way to sport? At McDonalds? At the dinner table? A survey taken a few years ago in the US, Canada and Britain, found that about a quarter of adults with children under the age of 18 ate dinner together at home seven nights a week. Another quarter said they ate together three or fewer nights a week. I am going to surmise that Australian households would not be too far off those figures.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) we know that the situation was different. Each night the dining table would be set with a simple cloth and serviettes, the cutlery and crockery would be laid out and as ‘dinner time’ neared an increasing number of hungry mouths would appear with the question, “what’s for dinner”?

What accounts for this decline in families eating together today though? The data seems to point to two main issues: Overworked parents and overscheduled children. When mum and dad get home in the evening they are soon in the car again to whisk the children off to sport, music, tutoring, church activities and a host of other events.

This nightly ritual around the dinner table however is both vital and fruitful: it is what anchors a family together. Sure, the conversation is not always profound and children argue and fidget. And sometimes the deepest and most meaningful times in a family are not at the table at all. However, even with all that in mind there is something unique about the time a family spends around the dinner table eating a meal together.

The security of the dinner table is a central place for the family to return to whether the times are joy filled, sorrowful or somewhere in between. It is the place where the family builds an identity. Stories are passed down, jokes exchanged and the wider world is examined through the lens of the family’s values. Children pick up vocabulary and a sense of how conversation is structured. They learn good manners and proper etiquette, something that will set them up for life. Meal time is often the time that families pray together. Dinner time is not ‘parent time’ or ‘children time’ but it is truly ‘family time’. Coming back daily to the same place helps instill familiarly. When a family closes their front door to world each night and sits down together around the table, they are subliminally stating, ‘this is what is most important to us; this is where we truly exist.’

Striving for regular family meals is not mere idealism. Experts in adolescent development are the ones who are saying that the daily investment in family time pays the largest dividends. Studies show that the more families eat together, the less likely the children are to smoke, drink, take drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables and learn how to socialise. One anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey stated, “If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouth with a tube. A meal is about civilising children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture”. You might recall the riots in England in 2011, to what extent would that have happened if families were at home having dinner? Especially in an era when divorce and family breakdown are at such high levels, the need becomes all the more urgent for children and parents to set down together and get to know each other once again.

There is no one-size-fits-all for families in regards meal times but it might be of benefit to really take a hard look at your family routine. Is it overbooked? Are you tired and frantic? Will your children be better off with more activities in their week? Why not cut back on a few activities and spend some unstructured time with your family? Start by planning some stay at home family dinners together. Set the table, turn off the TV and enjoy a meal together. Just a thought.

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Why I Decided Not to Move In With My Girlfriend

Posted: 2 May 2012

I have been going out with my girlfriend for almost three months and thankfully all is going very well. I was filling in a friend on this news the other day and at the end of the conversation the person asked me, with a face of anticipated excitement, “Will you be moving in together”? I was initially surprised by the question as I imagined it was obvious to most people I know where I would stand on such an issue. However I guess that it is no longer ‘obvious’ why a young dating couple would decide not to pack their bags and find a place together. Let me explain then why I have decided not to share a bed with my girlfriend.

Cohabitation prior to marriage is well and truly the most popular path for young couples. Just over 75% of couples now live together prior to marriage and for many of them it is something they slide into rather than necessarily consciously deciding upon. When he or she begins to spend more nights at the other person’s house than their own, eventually it seems natural to stop paying two lots of rent.

But while cohabitation is billed as an important way to get to know the other person and ensure a more secure future marriage there is really no evidence to back that up. Social data shows cohabiting relationships last about 2.5 years before breaking up or converting to marriage but conversion rates to marriage are declining. Among couples who begin cohabiting, 46% will have married and 46% will have broken up in within five years. For those who do eventually marry though, divorce rates are double those who do not cohabit before marriage.

Why then is cohabitation the accepted norm, and at the same time completely useless in helping couples discern their future? The answer to both questions is the same: sex. When a couple moves in together it is the fruit of that fact that they have began engaging in sexual relations already. Cohabitation is about sex, let’s not be confused. The cohabiting couple make the subliminal statement to each other that “I don’t need to be married to you to have sex with you”. That is a very critical statement in the health of a relationship because sex goes from something once worthy of vows before God, to something not much bigger than deciding what one will have for lunch. The vow a cohabiting couple make is this, “I promise to have sex with you until such a time that I meet someone else who I would rather have sex with”. I watched the movie ‘The Vow’ recently, a romantic comedy/drama based on a true story. The main couple meet, begin dating and eventually the guy asks the girl to move in with him. The scene was portrayed as this special romantic moment where the man had finally stepped up and done the right thing. Rubbish! All he had really said was, “I want to have sex with you more regularly but I want the freedom to end it all in case it doesn’t work out”. How romantic is that?!

So what about the couples who do live together but eventually marry? I question the freedom with which they entered into that marriage and their real desire to be together until death. Sex by its very nature is designed to bond a couple but when a relationship gets physical before its time, important issues like character, life philosophy, and compatibility go to the wayside. Consequently, everything is romanticised and it becomes difficult to remember the important issues let alone talk about them. When a dating couple engage in sex, they disregard checking for an intellectual commitment and instead enter into an emotional and sexual one. Budding love is very fragile and can easily be crushed by lust. Just because a cohabiting couple may eventually make it to the altar (or more likely the garden) is not a sign that share a true love. Many couples who marry today do not choose marriage as freely as they might have, they often simple slide into it. It just became the next choice in a series of unwise choices. A cohabiting relationship is based on the principle that one can walk away at any time and this attitude is not easily dislodged just because a wedding certificate has been signed.

Couples who cohabit certainly desire love and they undoubtedly try their best to love one another, but the problem is their best will not be good enough because they are relying on tainted and corrupted information. They learn how to have sex with the other person but not about the person, they desire to be loved but fail to understand how to love.

If I was not interested in discerning any possible future with my girlfriend, then sure, we might as well shack up now. But my heart like every other human heart desires to find a love that will last a lifetime. I have a far diminished chance of finding that love if I take the easy option now and simply follow the social trend. Love is too precious a commodity to be is cheapened and destroyed through the social evil that is cohabitation.

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Are Electronic Games Making Us Stupid?

Posted: 9 April 2012

What is the obsession with electronic games? Last week a business woman was standing in front of me on the train physically shaking her mobile phone to ‘mix’ some sort of potion. Just yesterday the man sitting next to me was hitting his screen like a mental patient in a quest to break open coloured balls and release stars. Why are seemingly normal people filling their time with activities that would serve to occupy the intellectual capacity of a four year old?

Now granted, not all electronic games are about mixing potions or breaking open coloured balls. In the most popular mobile phone game Angry Birds – downloaded 50 million times – players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playing field. There are games where one can grow and harvest crops, save the world from alien invasion or match up coloured tiles. One friend told me she caught two students in her classroom milking a cow on their iPhones!

I am sure there are some benefits to be gained from some electronic games (after all nothing is completely devoid of goodness). However, my assertion is that far more is to be gained by never playing electronic games than mastering such games and then looking for the supposed benefits. In this instance my concern is not even with the violence, sexual innuendo or criminal behaviour that many games contain (although there is plenty of concern to be had there). The issue is that games which are as foolish as launching birds at pigs or as complex as leading an army into battle are actually taking the reality out of reality.

We are called to be men and women who live in the world, who engage with people, who build communities. We are called to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, visit the sick and teach the ignorant. We are called to be mothers and fathers and raise up children who will lead lives in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. We are called to leave the world in a better state than when we arrived. And I just can’t see how electronic gaming fits into any of that.

Yes we all need recreation and rest time but sneaking in a few minutes of ‘Chicken Revolution’ or ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ while queuing for coffee or waiting for the bus is hardly in the realm of authentic recreation. Mobile phone games take the time a person would have formally devoted to staring into space or reflecting on life. Home video games take the time a person would formally have devoted to speaking to a human person or doing anything else; playing a board game, exercising, building, sewing, cooking.

Our society already has a sever lack of men who would be men and of fathers who would truly engage with their families. Manhood is given to defend women, to raise children, to protect a nation…in reality…not on a computer screen. How many men are living like teenagers, spending hours each night pretending to be a superhero…when they really need to be a superhero to their family? How many relationships flounder because a man is more concerned with getting to the next level on his PlayStation? All men, particularly young men, need to guard against becoming too soft, becoming too used to their own pleasure. Being trained by an electronic game to ‘switch off’ does not correspond to true masculinity.

It is not just the men though; society needs women who truly live to nurture and care. In 2010 a woman in her mid 30’s was banned by the court from using computers after her obsession with a game led to her children being reduced to eating cold baked beans from the tin while the dogs starved to death and their bodies were left on the lounge room for two months. In that same year a South Korean couple was found guilty of letting their newborn baby starve to death while tending to a virtual child in the online game ‘Prius’. The couple played in internet cafes for up to 10 hours a day and bottle fed their baby only once a day. These are not bad people, they simply responded according to the design of the game and that is to become addictive, to cause us to desire refuge in a world of pixels instead of the one we actually live in.

I am just putting the thought out there, that maybe, just maybe, electronic gaming brings less good to our lives than we might think. So next time you have ten spare minutes take a moment to question what actual purpose breaking open coloured balls on your mobile phone is going to have in your overall life.

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Theology of the Body as it was in the Beginning

Posted: 21 December 2011

People ask a lot of questions of the Catholic Church, especially in regards morality. “What is the problem with sex outside of marriage?” Why is contraception immoral?” “Why does marriage have to be between one man and one woman?” People used to challenge Jesus with similar questions. At one point a group of Pharisees came up to Christ to ask him if divorce was permissible. To their surprise though He did not simply point them to the written law but instead he invited them to consider that “from the beginning God made them male and female” and created a marriage bond that could not be broken. The Pharisees complained that Moses had allowed them to divorce, but even though this had happened, Christ looked deeply at them and said “but from the beginning it was not so.”

Why direct the people to the beginning and not just the written law? Because Christ was directing them to the law written on their hearts. We exist in a fallen world, in a world where we struggle to do what is right, where the body and the spirit battle one another. However, it was not always like that, there was a time when humanity knew what it was to love God, love others and love themselves rightly. This time was before Original Sin entered the world and we read about it in just a few short passages in the book of Genesis. Thirty years ago a young Pope John Paul II began to give a series of addresses that delved back into the beginning so that we would know better the answer to the questions, ‘Who am I’ and ‘What does it mean to be human’. These addresses are known today as the Theology of the Body.

Pope John Paul saw such importance in the beginning, because he believed that even though humans now lived in a world marred with Original Sin, they carried within their hearts the remnants of what it was to live without sin, before Adam and Eve ‘ate the apple’ (there really was no apple, check your bible). In his catechesis, John Paul named three original experiences that existed before the Fall. He called them Original Solitude, Original Unity and Original Nakedness. After Original Sin these three became ruptured but when Jesus points the Pharisees back to the beginning he is saying that this is the way they are called to live. No longer does he want us to live under the weight of the law but rather to understand that when we know who we are as human persons, the knowledge of what is right and wrong wells up from within us.

In the experience of solitude, God had created only one person and God recognises it was not good that the human person be alone. This person was invited to name all the animals and through that find someone similar for himself. Yet after giving names to all the animals of land, sea and sky, the human discovered there was no one like him. Why? The human had a body and all the animals had bodies so what was lacking? The difference was that the body of the human was symbolic; it contained a person, a spiritual being. The human realised that he was not an animal or an object but he was a subject with reason and free will.

In the experience of unity God created a second being from the rib of the first being and creation was completed with male and female, equal in dignity. At the sight of the woman, the man cried out with a great joy because here was a body that also represented a human person. Their bodies had differences but it was their diversity that made true unity possible. The man and woman realised that their bodies called them to love and that they were created to be a gift to one another.

In the experience of nakedness the man and the woman enjoy a total trust and defenselessness before each other. They rest in the knowledge that the other person would never use them as an object but always see them as a person to be loved. There was a total unity between the spiritual and the physical sides of the human person.

This was the paradise we were created for but we all know something changed.

That change was Original Sin and it ruptured all the future generations understanding of what it was to be a human person. It was as if a great amnesia came over humanity. It has become hard to sense God in our lives and recall that we are spiritual as well as bodily. The differences between men and women became seen as obstacles and causes for blame. There became a tendency to use one another, in their lusts men dominate women and in a confused desire for love women allow themselves to be used. Everything has been turned upside down.

When Christ is speaking to the Pharisees he is also speaking to every human person and he invites us to simply remember who we are. Every moral question has an answer at the dawn of creation. This was the whole reason Christ came; to point the way out of amnesia and remind us that that “in the beginning it was not so.”

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Winning at the Dating Game

Posted: 27 November 2011

Dating someone is tricky business. It is a bit like playing poker, we do not want to reveal our cards too quickly, yet if we hold onto them for too long the correct moment can pass and the game might be lost. In both dating and poker there is always a risk factor involved. If you never sit down to play a game of poker it is absolutely guaranteed that you will never lose a game of poker, however, it also means you will never win a game of poker. Similarly if you never allow yourself to enter into a relationship with another person it is absolutely guaranteed that you will never be hurt by the other person, but of course it is also guaranteed you will never share in the joys of a relationship.

While there is always the risk of getting hurt in a relationship it is possible to live out a relationship in a way that both minimises the risk of hurt and increases the likelihood of discerning whether or not it is a relationship that might be a keeper. Everything really comes down to prudence, which in modern times has sadly been reduced to being overly cautious. However, prudence is the pivotal virtue which gives us the ability to know what actions are appropriate for us in a particular time and place. Prudence is very much ‘practical wisdom’ for daily living.

So here is my list of three ways to practice prudence in a relationship. They are three ‘do-nots’ but each ‘do not’ should be seen as an invitation to ‘do’ something. The points are simple in theory but not always so in reality. Just as one needs to practice strategy and skills to win at poker, one needs to practice strategy and skills to win at dating.

One. Do not place all your hopes for happiness on the other person. This rule works for dating right through to marriage. There is a natural desire in a relationship to seek joy through the person we are with, and that makes sense, I mean if there was no joy in being with a person why would we bother? We all come to a relationship though with our personal set of needs, perhaps we have a tendency to be lonely, or, perhaps we have a low sense of self worth. It is important to try and discover what our particular needs are and be aware that we do not place them all on the other person because if we do that we will very quickly suffocate them. And we can become so suffocating that we kill off any future the relationship might have had.

Two. Do not neglect the rest of your life. When we begin a relationship with someone who brings us a great deal of happiness we can tend to leave other parts of our life to one side. We naturally desire to spend more and more time with the other person and that is not a negative but it can cause us to put aside the company of family and friends and focus solely on the person we are in a relationship with. Especially at the start of a dating relationship, there needs to be aspects of our life that exist, to some extent, without the other person, we need to remain who we were before we begun dating. Without that balance of other people and activities we risk finding ourselves back at point one putting all our needs on the other.

Three. Do not grasp for what is not there…yet. This is perhaps the most important point. If you really think about it, most of the problems we have in relationships come about because we try to jump ahead of where we are. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we reach out to take the fruit because we do not want to wait. Often we grasp out of fear, we are scared that the outcome which we long for will not come to us. Ironically when we do grasp in a relationship we can end up taking a step backwards, we can do damage to the way we see the other person and end up being disappointed and hurt.

If you are dating someone, the relationship will last because you have played the ‘game’ correctly. If we suffocate the other with our needs, if we let the other aspects of our life lay empty, we will end up letting some card slip out to soon and others come out too late. And once that is happening we can grasp at the end result all we want, it will only serve to frustrate the relationship and we risk losing the game entirely.

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