To Love Perfectly: The Story of why I wrote it and its purpose

 To Love Perfectly

    

    Recently I have finished writing a manuscript for a novel. Now, I desire to let it be known why I have written it and what purpose it serves as well as how it came about.

How To Love Perfectly Came to Be:

    There was a culmination of events in my life and discussions that lead up to even the idea of writing such a novel. First, the many struggles I have found in pursuing love. I like many other people am not perfect. I recognize this. However, there are times even in our recognition of imperfection that we are blind sighted. For me it was love and to an extent still is. I never fully grasped the concept of love. I always understood it as just a good feeling or a desire to be with someone or something. The only philosophy I got in high school was whatever I did on my own such as reading Plato's Republic or Prince by Machiavelli which have had a significant impact on the way I view the world. Whatever was discussed in class was usually just Plato's allegory of the cave or some enlightenment political theory. It was empty compared to the pursuit of truth. I had many failures with love in high in pursuit of women only to love the idea of them or to objectify them for their beauty and to see them only for the empty actions and looks they gave me. Or to be prejudiced towards women who I thought were childish and whose hearts were only filled with joy and I shunned them and chose to ignore their desire for me out of selfishness. This continued until recently when I took Human Nature with Mr. Michael Brown and Literature 102 with Dr. Alex Taylor at Christendom College. I saw what desire is, I saw the wrongs I had committed and in literature I read the divine comedy which I draw a lot of inspiration from. There is no other peace of literature besides the Bible that shows such a full understanding of love and beauty than Dante's Divine Comedy. In philosophy I was told you might not find happiness in this life but Christ promised peace. I agreed with that. Then I was taught that the soul is drawn to its happiness therefore happiness is completion. I'd disagree with this statement and that's partly why I wrote this novel. Completion isn't the means of happiness. Rather happiness is the means to completion, and you find happiness through love. Completion is the end goal and happiness is the means. That's partly what my novel does as well it corrects this notion. I began to realize something greater I need to love perfectly, yet I can't how do I do this. What was funny was fate had it I was in the car with Mr. Brown after getting ice cream with him and other students that love was brought up and he explained that the love our lord gave is perfect love and that we need to strive to have perfect love. Some of us can and some of us can't yet since we were made in the image of God, we can obtain this perfect love since Christ is human. In order to love perfectly we must love imperfectly so that we might know of perfect love. I explore this theme specifically in the narrative and I hope you'll see it too when it is published. It was this conversation that inspired me to write To Love Perfectly. I also made sure it would have 14 chapters because I wanted it to mirror the 14 stations of the cross and there are a lot of biblical themes. I try not to have them overpower though and it is undoubtedly a Catholic novel, but I really hope non-Catholics can see past that and see its beauty towards completion.

The Purpose

    The Purpose of To Love Perfectly is simply as the title says to love perfectly the way in which love is perceived is shallow or disordered. We need to change this. Order your life and order your love so that it might be a perfect love of self-sacrifice to the good of others. We cannot love if we are in love with the idea of someone and grow in obsession. To have false idols and false loves not only hurts us but those around us and that is why we must grow to know how to love perfectly. That is the purspose of the novel is to know the different kinds of love and how to love perfectly so that it might be ordered rather than disordered.

During the writing of To Love Perfectly

    Now that the purpose and how it came to be is clear as I wrote it I always knew I want to get at something bigger. I then also realized as I wrote it even though the topic is simple there is so much to explore and even with character development I began to see that I was getting towards something far greater than just a philosophical dialogue. I felt like Saint Thomas Aquainas when he began to grasp at the straws of God but realized he was only grasping at the straws not the whole picture despite how much he understood. I was halfway through writing when I knew how I wanted to end it and knew that it must show completion. I'm not going to say how it shows completion or how it ends. Besides that it shows completion. I knew that I had grasped at the straws of loving perfectly and provide a good enough definition. The definition is only good enough so that we might know how to order our love but it does not grasp at the full picture. I kept my project a secret until I neared its end and decided that I should get it published. As of writing this blog I believe I'm going to try self publishing through barns and noble and I'm going to use this website as the publishing website since it is self published. 

For the future to come

    I've also come up for a few more ideas of works to write that I've personally already titled and though about The Last Gentleman (I've thought about this one long before I even wrote To Love Perfectly) and another project to serve as a French-Canadian epic that will be multigenerational and take place during the course of French-Canadian history called: The Generations of the Wandering Canadien or its French title: Des Generetions du Canadien Errant. I am of French-Canadian descent and I am very proud of my heritage and culture, however, it is a shame what it has come to, and I truly believe God is punishing my people and not allowing us freedom because we have abandoned him. French is not my "native tongue" but it was only 3 generations ago that it was. I'm also continuing to work on my college vlog series called: "The John Lee Christendom Expierience" yes experience is misspelled because it just became to iconic to be honest.