CHARITY: LOVING "WITHOUT WAX"

Merlin and Arthur Pendragon

When last did you say you were sincere? The English word “Sincere” has a longstanding history, as it evolved from the Spanish sin cera – “without wax.” Dan Brown, in his Digital Fortress, relates that during the Renaissance Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with “cera” – “wax.” A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a “sculpture sin cera” or a “sculpture without wax.” This phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. When we love with strings attached we merely love, but when we do so without wax – sincerely – we are engaging charity. But what is love, and when is it with strings attached or without wax?

Experience has shown that habitual concepts become so simple in outlook but complex in explication. Love is one of them. A particular person feels it for her parents, siblings, husband, children and grandchildren, country and colleagues, boyfriend and God. And since this feeling appears not to be in the same proportion for the various categories exemplified above, then the character of the concept of love appears not to be straightforward. This then makes it not only complex but complicated. Be that as it may, the definition of love I’ll favor here is one I’d known since I was a child: The feeling that you feel when you feel a feeling you have not felt before. Although I now find some loopholes in this definition, adding it, however, to the intuitive notion of love you have would do. Suffice it then to say that why you love your loved ones is because you feel for them what you don’t feel for the rest of the billions of the world’s population. And I guess that which you feel for God looks like it too.

Loving with strings attached, leaning on the preceding understanding of love, is simply the nursing of love feelings for someone or something on the grounds of actual or anticipated benefit. It could be natural or self-induced. Nature  induced benefit could be seen in the love for family and country, and the self-induced in that for friends and other contracted love relationships like marriage. And did nature actually inspire in you the love for God or you found reasons to on your own? The strings here could be companionship, protection, provision, pleasure, identity, care, security, favors, peace, well-being and happiness, etc. What about philanthropy? Philanthropists appear to be doing so for mere fun and the trumpeting of their vanities, this trumpeting methinks is a string attached.

Loving without wax! The exposition of the word “Sincere” gives it away: true and selfless love. When was the last time you gave food or drink to people you’re pretty sure had only to offer in return – and your left hand didn’t see what your right hand was doing? When was the last time you went an extra mile to pursue a course in which you had no interest stake for a total stranger or just whomever? And when that poor man called in his distress did you cast haughty looks down upon him?

And of course you could love those you’ve loved with strings attached without wax. How? Simple. Just delete the strings. You can love your parents beyond what they do for you. Although being a spouse is string-attached enough, you can love your spouse “without wax” transcending that status and holding him or her to an esteem deserving of God.

Just go out there and love “without wax.”