Maganimity
# Reference
- Source: Atlas/Maps/DLQ 10 MOC
- Keywords: Cards/permanent notes
permanent notes
Permanent Notes...
- Relevant Notes:
- Module 1A
- Module 1B
- Module 2
- Module 3
# Notes
- Love is the key to Cards/Maganimity
- Love is assumed to be cheesy…we forget that love is so much more than that
- Scott Peck: “I define love thus: ==The will to expand one’s self for the purpose of nurturing others==”
- St. Thomas Aquinas: Love is to ==will the good of the other== as other
- Love is an act of the will
- Love = (willing the) Good
- Good = think about flourishing; benefit
- The Paschal Nature of Love (John Haughey, SJ)
- Paschal: Passion, Death, and Ressurection of Christ
- both of these acts require the self
- Dying from self-absorption → realizing there is more to life than the self
- Rising to self-donation → now you need to give yourself to somebody who needs; your purpose is to go beyond the confines of yourself to do something meaningful to somebody else
- Extras/Media/Excalidraw/The Paschal Nature of Love.png
The Paschal Nature of Love
==⚠ Switch to EXCALIDRAW VIEW in the MORE OPTIONS menu of this document. ⚠== Text Elements The Paschal Nature of Love...
- If you give a gift that isn’t valuable…it isn’t a gift.
- You’re just throwing out trash
- When you give yourself to other people, do you value that part of yourself?
- Love as a “panacea” (Bishop Robert Barron sermon; February 5, 2020)
- Panacea: miracle medicine; cures everything
- There is no such thing as a panacea…but perhaps the closest thing is exercise
- Self-care; therapy; medicine
- We only really start invoking these things when we see that something is wrong
- We cannot take a purely ==curative== approach when it comes to our mental health
- No amount of solutions is enough to cure what ==ails us from within==
- Think of love as the exercise that your soul needs
- Despite its benefits, it always comes with certain risks
- If you don’t put your body at the risk of vulnerability, it will not get stronger. Same applies to the soul
- Love heals and strengthens one’s soul just as exercise heals and strengthens one’s body
- Antifragilty (conceptualized by Taleb; applied to psychology by Haidt)
- Examples
- Wine glasses are fragile; damaged by disorder
- Plastic containers are resilient; unaffected by disorder
- Muscles are antifragile; strengthened by disorder
- Definition: ==the capacity to thrive due to shocks, stressors, volatility, uncertainities, and difficulties==
- Johnn A. Shedd: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for”
- Practical advice: Do an act of love to someone regularly no matter how small.
- Examples
- Problem: We love in blindly passionate ways.
- Passion leads; impulsive; reactive -> harmful
- Louie’s biking incident
- “I was pushing too hard without the necessary warm-up”
- “Once I recovered, I went biking again and felt stronger”
- Make sure that the intensity of love is accompanied by the wisdom of Cards/Discernment (Love wisely)
- What does this person need?
- Is what they’re asking from me good?
- Am I able to give it?
- Maybe…to a certain extent
- Jesus giving his life wasn’t an impulse decision. He was discerning his own life…and eventually saw that this was the only way to go
- Louie: “Hindi sapat ang magmahal nang todo; kailangan mo rin magmahal nang tama.”
- 4 Points About the Dynamics of Love
- Love is not something we lose
- We tend to think of it in economic terms
- Something we gain/lose
- Love as a transaction
- Do we ever run out of love?
- We may get tired of loving, but we never lose the capacity to love
- Love is not a commodity, but a capacity
- Otherwise, we’ll be very transcational about it
- We tend to think of it in economic terms
- Love is circular
- Is there an inverse relationship between loving yourself and loving other people? (What is the relationship?)
- The Circular Nature of Love (St. Thomas Aquinas): Loving others finds its ==strength== in self-love, and self-love finds its fulfillment in loving others
- Athlete analogy: Self-love is training; loving others is competing
- Self-love & loving others has a circular relationship
- Love is what makes us truly human (Homo amans)
- Sapiens: wisdom, competence, ingenuity
- We are getting smarter, but also so much more broken
- Why do we associate terrible human beings with animals?
- With our increasing competence comes increasing cruelty.
- Bishop Paolo Virgilio David’s speech:
- We survived and dominated the world because of our big hearts
- It’s never too late to return to God’s eternal design, identifying ourselves as Homo Amans (The Loving Humankind)
- The world is not broken because of a lack of competence, but because of a ==lack of compassion==
- Love is not for the faint of heart
- What is my purpose? To love.
- What is the best way to love in this life?
- In what way can I gift myself in this dysfunctional world?
- Find your unique way of loving. That’s a vocation.
- What are you being called to?
- “I don’t think I can do it”
- Money and personal happiness can follow if your heart is in the right place
- Don’t think of love as something impractical
- Difficult does not equal to impossible
- Isn’t that the acedia working?
- The maganimous life is the one that dares to love
- What is my purpose? To love.
- Henri Nouwen: The Challenge to Love
- “Perhaps the best definition of revelation is that it is ==safe to love==. The walls of our anxiety, our anguish, our narrowness are broken down and a wide endless horizon is known.”
- Love is not something we lose