My mom gave me The Dialogues of Fenelon Volume II for Christmas…how I LOVED volume I. I just have to write out one of his “dialogues” here…it is SO good:
“The true way to love our neighbors is to love them in God and for God. It is ourselves that we love in our friends, and this is an imperfect love. It is more like self-love than real friendship. How, then, must we love our friends? We must love them in the order of God; we must love God in them. That is to say, we must love the good things which God has endowed them, and we must, for His sake, submit to the privation of those things which He has denied them. When we love them with reference to self, our self-love makes us impatient, sensitive, jealous, demanding much, and deserving little; ever distrusting ourselves and our friends. It becomes wearied and disgusted; it very soon sees the termination of what it believed was inexhaustible; it meets everywhere with disappointment; it would like to have always that which is perfect, and finds it nowhere; it becomes dissatisfied, changes, and has no repose.
But the love of God, loving friends apart from self, knows how to love them patiently with all their faults, and does not insist upon finding in our friends what God has not placed there. It thinks of God and of what He has given; it thinks that all is good, provided it is from Him; and it can support that which God suffers to be, and to which it is His will that we should submit, by conforming ourselves to His designs.
The love of God never looks for perfection in created beings. It knows that it dwells with Him alone; and , as it never expects perfection, it is never disappointed. In a relative, in a friend, it acknowledges those tender ties which God has ordained. The more strictly these bonds are in the order of His Providence, the more the love of God sanctions them, and renders them strong and intimate. Can we love God without loving those beings whom He has commanded us to love? It is He that inspires this love; it is His will that we should love them; shall we not obey Him?
This love can endure all things, suffer all things, hope all things for our neighbor. It can conquer all difficulties; it flow from the heart, and sheds a charm upon the manners. It is melted at the sorrows of others, and thinks nothing of its own; it gives consolation where it is needed; it is gentle; it adapts itself to others; it weeps with those who weep, it rejoices with those who rejoice; it is all things to all men, not in a forced appearance and in cold demonstrations, but from a full and overflowing heart, in which the love of God is a living spring of the tenderest, the deepest, and the truest feeling. Nothing is so sterile, so cold, so constrained, as a heart that loves only itself in all things; while nothing can exceed the frankness, the tenderness, the gentle loveliness of a heart filled and animated by divine love.”
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