Lost in Translation

Testament in the Cursed Wood

"Love is perfectly weak because it has given up all aggression. Love is completely unconquerable because it is the greatest power of being.” Béla Hamvas speaks of love this way, not without good reason. He places his reflection on the gospel. Christ is born and offers himself as a Savior to those who want to follow Him and be a part of Him, respecting human will and desire, without violence and aggressiveness. The Virgin does not give birth to Christ by automatism, but she also conducts dialogue. An angel awaits her response without coercion. Moreover, she replies to the angel that she wants everything to be, “according to his (angel) word.” So God does not defy her will nor any of us. The abolition of our will is nothing but the destruction of ourselves, our authentic existence. The Gospel testifies that God does not want Mary as a blind object of His will, a tool of biology, i.e., birth. Divine Creator is the one who consults with her and initiates the conversation, and she is the one who accepts the role. Christ is born without imposition by the joint will of God and human beings. It seems that only in the will of consent biology could be lifted up into the space of the joint construction of love. In the end, Christ is born out of town, unobtrusively, and calls for love, not to control people but to liberate them. Almighty gives a chance to humanity so that people could unlock their inner capacities, i.e., salvation becomes the realization of people’s authenticity.

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Sometimes, in life, we must be cruel to preserve ourselves. Otherwise, we are in danger of not being authentic, and that is cruelty to ourselves. If you do not love yourself, can you genuinely love others?! If you extinguish your desires and your will, do you still believe that your presence can enrich anybody? Do others think that they can be enhanced by what they are not? Would that be possible if one wants to break the will of another and turn the other into himself/herself?! In such a way, a very notion of love tragically becomes its negation, instead of "Love the other as yourself," turns into "love only the other who has to become like you." But it is no longer love; it is just selfishness - built on the strong will and powerful desire in the tyranny of pathetic.

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The love that implies a sense of freedom is one that frees us from natural constraints, fear, biology, and social restraint. Where is that moment, moment of absolute trust that allows us to live in abundance, as a foretaste of the trustful and borderless love? Where is that moment in which we find an assurance that bliss of love could be something else and something more?! In our own lives, love can hardly be a permanent category in its fullness. It can be revealed only fragmentary as an ideal in a gift of time.

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Through the union of two people, all boundaries fall. Making love gives us a sense and the breath of paradise that reassures our longing for something more than the moment itself - the Kingdom of God as the promise of fulfilled love. On the contrary, an intimacy that ends in the negation of another, or enslaved by biology - remains the opposite of love. As such, the sex act hinders our aspiration for the Kingdom of God. It becomes our very expression of a belief that ideal love does not exist; consequently, we do not need the Kingdom of Heaven/love. An enjoyable experience of the blending of two human beings, a possibility that can exist between the people, comforts, or discourages us into the existence of God and Heaven.

But the loss in translation occurs right here, in the struggle between the unity of two human beings seen as an act of biology (horizontal love) and the very same deed seen as freedom, even freedom from biological conditioning itself (vertical love). In the absence of love, the first belief ends in a tragic reduction of our lives into earthly (horizontal) hope of eternal existence. In such a setting, the eternal life that Christ offers is unnecessary, for genes and natural reproduction provide eternity. Union of two beings without emotion and respect for one another is merely a cynical expression of life and, consequently, negation and the very need for Heaven as a metaphor of authentic love experience that God promises us. We make mistakes in our search, and we are disappointed in the hope that love, even as a glare, can exist. It's not just a disappointment in the emotional sense; it's a more existential betrayal.

Sexual union thus has the potential of touching the sky (vertical), pointing the finger at the possibility of a perfect sense of love - absolute confidence in surrendering to another. The embodiment of love seems to become alive and infallible in the fused bodies of two human beings. So the unity itself becomes “Christmas,” love becomes the body (Christ became the body) - the personal body. But without love, joining becomes a cynicism to life, a mockery of our existence. When we drain emotions out of the sexual union, we destroy potentially the most valuable experience of our actuality. There is also something suicidal about this expression of our sexuality. In the same manner, if we override the will of the other human being in the sexual intercourse, sexuality itself takes on monstrous forms of self-agglomeration and possession. It often seems that people's tendency towards bodily unity is not a mere product of instincts, even when a human being is unconscious of this. Even insentient, we feel that sexuality can attain something higher than ourselves. Although we often miss the mark, staying in front of the closed doors – never being able to see enough out of it.

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In the end, it's weird. One strives for stability, and then when it gets there, suddenly realizes that it is not happy anymore. There is that static certainty - the pursuit of persistence. But there is another certainty, which assures us that everything is fluid and variable – and that is the most certain thing throughout our lives. Fighting for a static certainty is the abolition of man's ability to realize himself in fullness. What we seek almost always translates into the "death of our potentiality." We strive for marriage, family, work, and then when we get there, it just becomes the casket of our existence.

God makes us alive, going beyond simple norms of rules and morality. Why do we need Creator?! In order to realize our authenticity, we need to disrupt our peace of static certainty. Once we do that, we are in danger that many will abandon us (John 6: 66). It is God, the only One who has the love, patience, and power to forgive us for our “craziness” so that we can still feel alive.

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Lost in translation, we often remain strangers because we do not understand the language of love, which each of us reads and sees differently. The consent of the will, the respect of the other, the freedom that has no boundaries, and the love that cannot be built by us, often remains only a dying ideal in our heads. In its pursuit of love, human being gives up on the idea of vertical love and chooses a horizontal one – following societal norms. Even a small measure of fluidity scares us so much that over time we decide to prefer staying static and secure. Lost in the translation convert vertical into horizontal inverting the gospel words, so that: "Love the other as yourself," now becomes: "Love only the other, others who must become you."