Life offers us endless opportunities to learn how to love. Every man and every woman, every day of their lives, has ample opportunity to give themselves to Love. Life is not a holiday, but an education.
And the most important lesson we can learn is how to love.
How to love better.
What makes someone a great artist, a great writer or a great musician?
Practice.
What makes someone a great man or woman?
Practice. Nothing else.
Spiritual growth applies the same laws used by body and soul. If you don’t exercise your arms, you will never develop your biceps. If you don’t exercise your soul, you will never develop strength of character or beauty of spiritual growth.
Love is not a brief moment of enthusiasm.
Love is the rich, strong, generous expression of our being – character in its fullest sense. And to build that requires constant practice.
What was Christ doing in the carpenter’s workshop?
Practising.
Even though he was perfect, we read that he learned obedience and thus grew in wisdom and in favour with God and men.
Try to see the world as a great education in Love and do not quarrel with your lot in life. Do not complain because of your unending cares and anxieties, your mean surroundings, the small and sordid souls you are obliged to live with.
That is God’s way of making you practise.
And do not be alarmed by temptation or surprised because it is always there and never moves away, despite all your efforts and prayers. That is God’s way of putting your soul to work.
All these things are teaching you to be patient, humble, generous, unselfish, kind and courteous. Do not push away the Hand that is shaping your image, because that Hand is also showing you your path.
Be assured, you are growing more beautiful with each minute that passes – and although it may not seem like it, difficulties and temptations are God’s tools.
Remember Goethe’s words: ‘Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life.’
Talent develops itself in solitude, through prayer, faith, meditation and seeing the unseen.
But character can only grow if we remain in the stream of life.
Because it is in the world that we learn to love.
I have named a few of the elements of Love as a way of helping us understand God and our fellow man.
However, these are only elements. Love can never be defined.
Light is more than the sum of its ingredients – it is something that glows and shines in space.
And Love is much more than the sum of all its ingredients – it is something living, pulsating, divine.
If we were to mix together all the colours of the rainbow, we would simply create the colour white - not light.
In the same way, if we put together all the virtues we have talked about, we might become virtuous, but that doesn’t mean we would have learned to love.
So how do we go about bringing Love into our hearts?
We work our will hard in order to keep Love close.