ACTUALLY, love comes from the most unexpected places. That rings a bell since it comes from the most expected song (and in fact, one of the most requested songs in karaoke bars) when it comes to love.
For fear of being redundant, let us just say that the song picks up its title from the line we just quoted. Jose Feliciano, composer and singer, sure knew how to immortalize the source of love.
Truly, love can be found in many and sometimes in unexpected corners in our life. Actually, love has become a common noun bandied around like a ping-pong ball. People say they “love hotcakes” in the same breath they say they “love my husband.”
It’s as if husbands and hotcakes have the slightest similarity—or maybe they do. Some husbands are indeed hotcakes.
This being the love month, we are tasked with the project of looking how love looks like when it walks down the street in mufti; how it feels when it wanders around hospital corridors; how it sounds when it talks to a dying person.
Our idea of love comes from preppy collections that can be found on the Internet. From the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, we have “love is a temporary madness,” as if love were some kind of mental illness. Maybe we can give an inch and say that we do go crazy when we are in love.
However, a brisk walk around a hospital hallway and boring daily rides home have given us some idea of love’s pedestrian personality.
Social workers. Social workers are the real unsung heroes of our time. We talk so much about the overseas Filipino worker being the modern-day hero. But right here in our backyard, we have these men and women running private and government agencies—and generally for so little wage in return.
A few years ago, we worked in a private, child welfare agency. That is where we came face to face with love as a person who would wake up at midnight to answer the call of a distressed client or who would walk five kilometers to follow up on a child beneficiary.
Paying it forward. Just this week, our cousin Pat (Pacifica is her given name) landed in the hospital. Her daughter, Gwen, is taking care of everything.
Gwen told us that she also sees to her aunt Ludi, who has retired from teaching and now lives in Sibonga. Every week, this young mother visits her aunt. She offers the former Physical Education teacher some hope and laughter.
Returning the goodness that others have given us is the other form of love.
It does not whisper sweet nothings or cause electricity to course through our fingertips and on to our lips. No, but it is love. We told her: “Gwen, you are the child Ludi never had.”
Ludi has never married, and so she never had an opportunity to build a family. We who are now in our “half-century” mark can only pray that God will give us someone like Gwen, who will walk with us when we are a ripe 80 years old.
This is what “love is blind” means. It is the ability to see beyond the physical and even relational, and at the same time not jeopardize what is good.
Social workers taking care of the poorest of the poor, strangers giving food to elderly people who have made the sidewalk their home—all these images give us an idea of just how deep love can be.