Friday, March 27, 2015

The loving blog post product




A food product, mostly eaten, was sitting in the staff refrigerator today. It was in the way of my shrimp and broccoli, so I had to gently poke it aside. I'm not sure what it was. It had lots of plastic and labels. The label said "Packed with love".

No corporate product is made with love. Jesus is not packing your mass produced hummus. Cliodhna, the Irish goddess of love and beauty, has not swathed your California blueberries in plastic protection. And when the marketing department comes up with the labeling that says "Packed with love" they are not doing it with love, they are doing it with a bland, merciless ambition, with a workaday calculation.

But I am no naif. I know how the world works. I know that it is a hard world full of mean lies, casual lies, soulless lies, mercenary lies, general lies. You shrug them off. It's no big deal, a bit of mud, a spot of crude oil off a duck's back, right?

But it's good to notice anyway, because every impersonal lie is like a bit of wrapping. It can be all kinds of wrapping; pretty wrapping, tough wrapping, luxurious wrapping, and on and on through all the adjectives. But inside it holds something that is always the same; a little bit of the inexhaustible darkness and coldness of deep and absolute space.

We have wrapped this nothingness with love.




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