So I have been listening to beautiful songs on YouTube . . . songs that move me . . . this . . . and this . . . and this . . .
Can you tell (?), I do like a quiet furry voice, a thinking mind, and a certain quality of almost painful gentleness - er . . . tenderness I guess it's called.
But, oh, glory! With the songs come (sigh) the adverts. One that comes up repeatedly for a site that promises to teach women how to catch and keep men. Promises to show them the ten things they are doing wrong that make men want to pull away, and how to modify their behaviour so they can (presumably) trap the men and keep them prisoner forever.
Why would you want to do that? What is love, if it is not free? I like men. I love the man I am married to. But I have no desire to keep him in a cage, tied to me by promises, manipulation and fascination. Even the thought makes me tired. What he is, I love. What I am, I am.
Something I read years ago . . . when I was about 18 . . . I jotted it down somewhere . . . from Anthony Padovano’s book Free To Be Faithful . . . just a minute . . . Yes, here it is:
The woman who abides at the side of her husband because everywhere else she is homeless is a woman who has given not compliance but freedom.
Same applies to men. At a time when many followers began to fall away disillusioned (a lot of people prefer illusions), Jesus said to his friends “Would you like to go too?” Peter (I love his candour. Not a flatterer!) answered Jesus: “Lord – to whom should we go?” This happens, I have felt it for myself; it is as if there were no other place in the whole universe to be but this. Well, not ‘as if’, even: there actually is nowhere but this place, this person, this situation: God’s gift to us of the present moment has about it a kind of imperative, which once we recognise it makes contentment possible in the most surprising of circumstances.