love thursday 05.17.12 ~ the greatest of these is love

All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion.

Thomas Merton

If we spend one moment every day trying to love someone or something, we have chosen the better path.

If we practice loving rather than judging, criticizing, hating, mocking, despising, or looking on with condescension, we have chosen the better path.

It doesn't matter how rich, beautiful, smart, funny, thin, fat, tall, short, stylish, tan, coiffed, shaved, or made up we are if we don't have love. Period.

Anything that is not about the practice of love is dangerous. [See above.]