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.
No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.
The aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love.
Love me like you'll never see me again.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
And I'll tell ya, I'm really enjoying this marriage thing. You think about each other. You care about each other. It's wonderful! Plus, I love saying 'my wife.' Once I started saying it, I couldn't stop - 'my wife' this, 'my wife' that...it's an amazing way to begin a sentence.
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
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