It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.
Interpretation
Loving our enemies allows us to gain deeper insights into ourselves and the divine.
Thomas Merton suggests that love, especially towards those we perceive as enemies, grants us unique access to understanding both our own identity and the nature of God. This transformative love is a key that reveals deeper truths about humanity and divinity.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on peace and reconciliation.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.
Love properly understood is Godβthe font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,_x000D_ _x000D_ Is - Love, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust.
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, `Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.' But I was one-and-twenty No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, `The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.' And I am two-and-twenty And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
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