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We Are Changed by Love

by John K. Stoner    (July 1, 2017)

Every loving act which a parent does for a child nurtures that child’s natural spirituality.

When a mother nurses her baby, she does a loving act, and the child is nurtured biologically by that act.  But it is also nurtured spiritually.  When it is nursed the child grows in confidence that this world into which it has come, out of the womb, is a supportive and nurturing world.  And when the child is held and snuggled by its mother or father, we would not say that it is nourished biologically,  but we recognize that it grows spiritually.  Its sense of wellbeing, security and peace is nurtured.  Human touch will make it a healthier and happier little person.  

Around the world, in all cultures and climates, human beings begin life and experience their first significant development by responding to loving actions.  This is true of the Innuit of Alaska, the aborigines of Australia, of Muslims, Chinese, Japanese and Europeans.  

Given that all humans begin life by being nurtured by love, it seems fair, and I would suggest necessary, to ask a question:  Is there a time when, or a reason why, people would cease being responsive to love through this spiritual capacity with which they were born?

Or again, a time or a reason, when parents, or any adult, should forget that their fellow human beings are creatures who respond to love?  

How, why, do cultures seemingly come to believe that their fellow humans respond only to force, coercion, or homicidal threat?

What does it matter that children respond to love?  Send  your thoughts by using the comments function below or in the right margin.  

It makes as much sense to argue that human behavior is shaped only by  nature or nurture as to argue that a coin held between your fingers is either heads or tails.  It is always both.

Think about times when your own behavior was shaped, changed, by a loving act extended to you. 

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