What is unconditional love? It’s love with no conditions, of course, which is close to impossible to attain if you carry this out to some theoretical level of the absurd. But for general parlance, we can all understand the useful idea of unconditional love. For example, you may love your wife or your kids unconditionally, but there are obvious conditional connections going on there; and you may love all humanity or nature but then how do these lofty constructs gain any real emotional juice or practical application?
For me, my parents represented good examples of unconditional love. Sure, they would beat my ‘bo-hinny’ if I stepped out of line, but they were always there and always cared through thick or thin. Another example, is the idea of the Goodly Shepard who would leave his entire flock of let’s say 100 sheep or so to go find and rescue that one unique, black little sheep that had wandered away from the flock, slipped off the side of a cliff and was hopelessly trapped, surely to die of exposure or in the jowls of a hungry wolf. If you have ever been that black sheep, and if someone has ever rescued you for no good reason, then you know what unconditional love feels like. Feels pretty darned good.
Unconditional love, when you receive it, changes you profoundly and forever. It means you are special and uniquely valuable just because you are you. You are not just a series of electro-chemical reactions in the material world. You are more. You have value. This unconditional love deeply binds ethics and character into the individual, it binds the family unit together, which in turn binds society and produces a better world for all of us to live in.
This is why it is important to realize that the small human we call a fetus is not just a blob of protoplasm to be discarded as you would an abscessed tooth, long finger nails or unkempt hair. And this is why it is important to revere, honor and respect our elderly, even if they can no longer contribute financially to the economy. If we want a better world to live in, we must start by being better people to live with; and for me, unconditional love is a good place to start.
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