The Culture of Life

I haven't wanted to blog because I haven't wanted to distract from my previous entry. Is there a more beautiful depiction of love as the picture below, with the tear in the eye of the mother as she protects her tiny, dying child with her body's warmth and the look of tender, ever-committed love on the face of the father?

I wish I was a brilliant philosopher who could put just the right words together to express what is deep in my soul about the critical foundation to society that is being chipped away (and sometimes blasted with dynamite). Pope John Paul II called it the Culture of Life and expounded upon it with grace...

The first and most fundamental step towards...cultural transformation consists in forming consciences with regard to the incomparable and inviolable worth of every human life. It is of the greatest importance to re-establish the essential connection between life and freedom. ... There is no true freedom where life is not welcomed and loved; and there is no fullness of life except in freedom. ... Love, as a sincere gift of self, is what gives the life and freedom of the person their truest meaning.

It goes beyond defending life from conception to natural death to include respecting the dignity of others with a love that is grounded in truth. Remove the truth, as Pope Benedict recently stated, and we have "charity that degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word 'love' is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite."

What I can do is use my simple mind to communicate the little glimpses of truth that I find in the philosophy of the Culture of Life that make my heart sing. Glimpses that I hope are not shallow and trite, but instead are simplicity on the other side of complexity, as Einstein calls it. Like this picture...

Or this quote...

We must know that we have been created for greater things...-we have been created in order to love and be loved. Mother Teresa

Or this family...