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Today's
quotation:
Our
job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not
they
are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's
business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will
render
both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Thomas Merton
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Today's
Meditation:
"Love
others." That's it, really-- the main reason
that we're here. We like to love the people who are
close to us, our families and friends and close
acquaintances. We like to give them things like
gifts and caring and the benefit of the doubt. We
like less to give and share love with people who aren't so
close to us, especially people who seem to us to be
disagreeable or even dangerous. The sad thing about
this is that many people who seem to be disagreeable or
dangerous seem that way because of a lack of love in their
lives, and guess what a bit of love might provide?
When
we share love, we share the best part of ourselves and we
make others feel loved, which is one of the most important
feelings of all in the human experience. And we are
bound by our shared humanity to share that love-- in our
families, at our jobs and schools, in the supermarkets, on
the highway when we're locked away inside our cars and we
feel isolated from everyone else. We can still share
love then. Giving love to others is simply
consistently making the decision to respond in a loving
way to whatever happens to us.
The
loving way, of course, isn't always easy, especially after
someone has just done something to upset us or anger
us. We have a choice in those situations to respond
in kind--to do something harsh to them to anger them-- or
to respond with love. Don't worry-- love doesn't mean
giving the person a hug and telling them you forgive
them. Sometimes the loving response can simply be to
not say anything at all; I've been in many situations in
which any words at all would have made things much
worse. My silence was the most effective tool I had,
even though someone else might have seen my silence as
being weak. Personally, I saw it as being as strong
as I could be.
Let's
spread love, and especially let's spread love to those
people who need it the most. I don't have to invite
them into my home and give them the best I have of
everything I have. Perhaps the love I show will be
in the form of a sincere compliment. Maybe it will
be in offering them help with what they're doing. It
could be shown in the form of forgiveness. Whichever
form it takes, we can be satisfied to know that we're
contributing to the love and the positive energy of the
world, and not to the negative things that fill so much of
life.
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