Love is Blind

So I will almost never post about religion on here. It's one of those sensitive topics. I grew up in a couple of pretty Southern towns, with all that implies about religion, and so, yeah, I started church at a pretty young age, and kept it up for quite a while. We went to different churches over the years, depending on where we lived -- mostly Baptist, but at least once Methodist and Presbyterian. I visited a great-aunt once who took me to Catholic Mass, and I've been to a Lutheran service or two (mostly babysitting). Oh, and we flirted with Unitarian Universalists for a few years while I was in HS, but that was a kind of DIY thing with a bunch of my mom's colleagues from the college where she teaches, so, y'know... kinda probably not at ALL how they really normally do things.

Anyway, truthfully, I'm not sure this is going to be about religion, anyway. Maybe spirituality, perhaps. Definitely LOVE. Religion? Maybe not so much.

See, when I was a kid, I thought (like, I'm sure, many right along with me) that the saying "Love is blind" meant that when you really, truly love with someone you're blind to their faults.

As an adult, and a parent, I can now see how very truly BAD that can be -- it seems like so many parents are trying to prove they love their kids by being blind to those kids' faults, willfully ignoring anything that doesn't fit into the little box they've created of what a perfect, adorable, lovable little ANGEL they've managed, somehow, to spawn.

So I'm not religious, but I am spiritual, and I've kind of latched onto God as being kind of a nice, amorphous, all-encompassing way to express that feeling of a power greater than myself that wraps itself around and into and through everything.

Anyway, the point I was wanting to get at way up there about "Love is blind" is that I've changed my mind. I don't think the blindness of Love is blindness to faults. I think it's blindness to externals. It's like a geometry theorem -- something I always struggled with in school, but I think I get in Real Life. If Love is Blind and God is Love, then God is Blind. But by definition, if God is Good then God cannot be blind to our faults. God can be blind to age, race, religion, disability, orientation, class, Mensa status -- but not those impulses that drive us to hurt ourselves, our fellow humans, the animals we share our homes with...

I'm not sure I believe in a separation of Good and Evil in the same way I believe in a separation of Church and State. I believe that sometimes things grow looking find on the outside that are less than fine on the inside. And there may be nothing we can do about that. All we can strive for is to be the example of the best things we want for our children, our families, our friends, ourselves.

There's more but it's divergent, and it's late.

The rest can shake around and hopefully bear some fruit in my poor noggin for another day.