This is our Lord's will... that our prayer and our trust be, alike, large.
Julian Of NorwichRead
Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord's meaning.
Interpretation
The essence of understanding divine purpose is rooted in love.
This quote from Julian of Norwich emphasizes the centrality of love in understanding God's intention and meaning in life. According to her perspective, love is not only the guiding principle behind all creation and actions but also the key to spiritual understanding and connection with the divine; one can only grasp the vast teachings of God through the lens of love, suggesting that love is both the message and the medium of divine revelation.
In practice
In a sermon about the importance of compassion, one might refer to this quote to illustrate that love is at the core of spiritual life.
This is our Lord's will... that our prayer and our trust be, alike, large.
Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes a third, a holy and wonderful delight in God, who is love.
Glad and merry and sweet is the blessed and lovely demeanour of our Lord towards our souls, for he saw us always living in love-longing, and he wants our souls to be gladly disposed toward him . . . by his grace he lifts up and will draw our outer disposition to our inward, and will make us all at unity with him, and each of us with others in the true, lasting joy which is Jesus.
Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love.
And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so.
Where I say that He abideth sorrowfully and moaning, it meaneth all the true feeling that we have in our self, in contrition and compassion, and all sorrowing and moaning that we are not oned with our Lord. And all such that is speedful, it is Christ in us. And though some of us feel it seldom, it passeth never from Christ till what time He hath brought us out of all our woe. For love suffereth never to be without pity.
Many people are despairing of the possibility of finding love. And some of the people who are despairing the most are in their thirties and forties and looking just great.
I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.
as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
I do not love thee, Sabidius, nor can I say why; I can only say this, "I do not love thee."
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand.
Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.
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