On Love

Each day, I have a tendency to surprise myself with my incredible capacity to fail in love. The number of things I wish I never said, or things I never had the openness to say in the first place...they could fill volumes, perhaps entitled, "Ice Princess" as a rather wise woman once said. I long to love others as HE did, to give freely and without reservation or entitlement.
I recently climbed my own personal Everest in the form of my first Dostoevsky novel, The Idiot. A admittedly fantastic read after the first 300 pages, I was struck by the obvious correlation between the Prince's humble, given and abused love to everyone around him, regardless of their love of him to the point of idiocy - and the love by which HE loved.
I would love to learn to love to the point of idiocy...I ask for the constant strength to love better.

Meditations on Love:

"The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let go and you will be free. Just as the sunrise of faith requires the sunset of our former unbelief, so the dawn of trust requires letting fo of our craving spiritual consolations and tangible reassurances. Trust at the mercy of the response it recieves is bogus trust"
(The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning)

"Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?"
(The Great God Brown, Eugene O'Neil)

"The way we are with each other is the truest test of our faith. How I trust my brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scared wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day maybe a better indication of my reverence for life than the anti-abortion sticker on the bumper of my car. We are not pro-life simply because we are warding off death. We are pro-life to the extent that we are men and women for others, all others; to the extent that there is no human flesh that is a stranger to us; to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love; to the extent that for us, there are no 'others'."
(The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning)

"Reason demands moderation in love, as in all things, but faith destroys moderate love. Faith tolerates a moderate love of ones fellow man no more than it tolerates a moderate love between man and G-D."
(John McKenzie)

"Israel, don't ever be so foolish as to measure my love for you in terms of your love for me! Don't ever compare your thin, pallid, wavering, and moody love with my love, for I am G-D, not man. More pleasing to ME than all your prayers, works and penances is that you would believe I love you"