Friday night, I went to see the Utah Shakespeare Festival's traveling production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Like the previous three years, they did a fantastic job, and I finally discovered why. What struck me most however was the theme of the play, and it bothered me.
After the play, the actors discussed with the audience the 'moral of the story'. As they threw back and forth different ideas, they colored some of them in shades of grey or painted questionable themes with a good connotation. One theme I saw bothered me- defy your parents for the lusts of youth. Most of it is exactly that, youthful lust, and while some people grow up and become adults because they do right things for the wrong reasons, consider how much more blessed are they who choose the better part.
Just over a week ago, I was talking with an old acquaintence of mine. I had not really heard from her for some time, and I haven't seen her in almost two years, primarily because of the boy with whom she was in a relationship. As she second guessed her decision to move on, I told her this: "You CANNOT love another person unless you love yourself. If you ever find yourself neglecting your own well-being or happiness, what you are doing is not love. It's codependence, which looks like love but is always destructive. Be true to yourself, always." Young people, however, like this young lady, misapprehend love. They call lust or desire or attraction or whatever 'love' as if they were synonymous, but they are not. Some of them look like love, but only love nourishes the soul.
I carry around an old copy of "Gospel Principles" originally issued to my grandfather as he served in the Pacific during WWII. During a conference in 1942, J Reuben Clark said the following:
That man or youth who demands without marriage as the price of his favor or love the enjoyment of your body, has in fact nothing but sorrow and degradation to give you in return. That woman who offers to you her body outside wedlock invites you to a feast that brings disease and corruption that will pollute you until death. Any man or woman who demands as the price of his favor or friendship a surrender of any of your righteous standards of living is offering you nothing worth buying.
Yet, many a youth has surrendered the prize for a sonnet, a conquest, or for some temporary pleasure. It changes the choices available to you, as a woman told me this week, because you may have to put off other paths if you get to take them at all as a consequence of your present indulgence to lust. Love, by contrast, always empowers, supports, and seeks and loves the truth. Most of what people call love is something else.
The rising generation is different from previous generations. As the opportunities to connect with strangers increase, intimate connections and conversations with closely associated persons diminish. They no longer know how to talk to anyone they actually know and frequently turn to the internet for friendships and beyond. Where a mission, abroad or in the adjacent state, once sufficed to help a young man mature into roles of responsibility and leadership, some of the youth return without having grown so and are still encouraged, literally or as a consequence of the culture, to marry, mate and multiply before they actually become adults. Whereas young women were once taught how to run a household, many of them now attend college for no other reason than to obtain an “Mrs. degree” or to date. Some of the fathers are noticeably absent when it comes to teaching their sons how to chivalrously defend the virtue of women. Some of the mothers are also actively engaged in efforts that appear designed to hold their daughters back from maturing and to select potential husbands over which they can exert power and influence. In times of general strife, all of these struggling newlyweds may burden others more than the struggles can ever help those couples or the children that seem to quickly follow their nuptials and in some sad cases precede them.
Much as I hate to admit it, a recent quote I heard from Johnny Depp about love sounds very much like wisdom. He tells guys that if they think they love one girl and find themselves interested in another, dump the first one and go after the second, because if they really cared for the first as much as they claim they would never have noticed the second.
Just a few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if she was wrong for not wanting to forgive her father for abuses that continue this day. You see, manipulating emotions or relationships is not love, even though her father claims he loves her. He might, but this particular thing is not an act of true love. As I read the summation of charity from the Bible, I felt impressed to tell her that Love rejoices in truth, which is not what an abuser offers, and that seemed to be the right thing to say.
It has been said that love is wasted on the young. I think that is true, not because only the young can act on it, but because the young call things love that are far from it. They use 'love' as a way to manipulate. They seek acts of love as a sign of love because they are uncertain of their own worth. Unable to really love themselves, they cannot and do not love their neighbor as themselves. If they did, they would not steal, rape, do drugs, be disobedient to parents, or manipulate the emotions of others. Hence, what they call love cannot possibly be, because they do not leave those they claim they love nourished by their affectations.
Several years back, a girl I knew and about whom I cared a great deal told me she loved me. A few weeks later, she told me she didn't love me, that she wanted to see how things might work out with an old boyfriend whom she once caught cheating on her with her best friend. My friends were and still are incredulous. What this particular woman did was foolish and resulted in something different than what she hoped. Not only did she trade a bird in hand for one in the bush, but she also lost the one in the bush! As Shakespeare reminds us in the play, "Cupid is a knavish lad, Thus to make poor females mad". You can say "I love you" and take it back if and only if you said it on the playground during recess. True love cannot be so tenuous a thing that it takes many months to build but mere moments to destroy. Love must include at least the idea of permanence, because truelove is forever. Besides, this other guy already proved he did not love her; if he had, he would never have been interested in another girl.
In the end, lust, and the youthful fascination with 'love' and acts of love is all about selfishness. It's about getting 'action' or attention or free gifts. Love rejoices in the right things, even if they are not pleasurable. I once heard a story of a man who was asked how he knew that his wife was the right person for him. He responded by telling of how she knew about his faults and supported him anyway. Real love endures.
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