“WHO doesn’t want to find true love?” was the question guest speaker Anna Krohn asked the record crowd at this month’s Faith on Tap (FoT) in Brisbane’s Pineapple Hotel.
The theme for the night was “Looking for love in all the right places”.
Anna, a Melbourne specialist in sexuality and bioethics, said “people want not just love but true love”.
“Many today bumble from one relationship to the next which don’t last …,” organiser Allison Atkins said after the event.
“(And) if they do marry, the lack of a solid traditional courtship – which these days is not even dismissed, but simply not known – there is more hesitancy … almost a sense of stabbing in the dark.”
The Faith on Tap team enlisted Anna to “break open this quest for love”.
“She identified that this stumbling and bumbling in matters of love is a lack of fundamental understanding of what the human person is,” Allison said.
“… Our magazines remind us of this as ‘A lister’ celebrities fall in and out of love like changing their outfit – looks, fame and money don’t guarantee success in the love stakes.”
Anna said humans were not “things” or “consumer friendly products to be used or abused … as a means to an end”.
“She reminded the group of the words of John Paul II,” Allison said.
“He said human beings are made for love not use … she was unpacking a ‘theology of the heart’ which integrated body, mind and soul.”
According to Anna, our minds also need to be “centre stage”.
“I also want to argue that the mind and the heart really need our decisions, and our intellect to be trained, strengthened and acknowledged, but without taking the heart and the body into account we are making human beings into robots, columns, angels, something less than concrete, something less than real,” Anna said.
The Melbourne intellectual is known for “vivid storytelling” combined with her “theatrical talents”.
“A memorable comment was ‘we need smart sex – there is no condom for the heart’,” Allison said.
“The heart is still exposed even if there is a condom.
“The two are inseparable.”
Anna’s advice for finding our way “back to true love” was based in scripture.
“It goes back to Adam and Eve where God said it was ‘very good’,” Allison said.
“God made Adam and Eve with their hearts and bodies and their goodness.
“Christ gave his body and heart on the cross.
“He shows us how he loves so that everything about us can be healed and made whole.
“We need conversation in these critical parts of ourselves … we need to cultivate our hearts to learn to love.”
Faith on Tap will extend this “love theme” with a play exploring relationships at their final 2009 gathering on December 14.
For more information go to their website www.faithontap.org.au
