There are three ways to get what one wants from life: industry, cunning, or love. Industry is good but at best conditional, for it is subject to the passage and ravages of time.
The “crafty” inevitably trap themselves.
Love, on the other hand, liberates those who seek its company, and it is timeless. When all is said and done, this order of love has the last word because it is its own reward: whatever we are willing to let it make of us, it fashions from itself.
But communion with this timeless love has a cost. It asks for all that we are … and more: it wants us to want to give what it asks of us. But real love never requests any form of sacrifice without first demonstrating why this magnitude of self-surrender is both wise and needed. And so it begins to prepare the heart for the road it’s being asked to travel.
Slowly but surely, our eyes are opened to see the ruthlessness of passing time; we witness within ourselves—and in the lives of all that surround us—the inevitable sorrow born of identifying with the string of temporary loves that mark its passage. These revelations set the stage so that, before too long, what divine love asks of us becomes the one thing that we now want to give to it more than anything else.
What a mystery!
Now, for our willingness to give all, we realize that just the opposite has taken place: we’ve been given everything. We are being remade by love into what we were never able to make of ourselves: whole, happy, fearless, and free.
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