Dr. Gerald May* offers the following quote from Francis de Sales: Love is the life of our heart. According to it, we desire, rejoice, hope and despair, fear, take heart, hate, avoid things, feel sad, grown angry, and exult!
He then follows with these observations:
Love is the most important quality of human life, and the least comprehensible. I am a little embarrassed to think how much time and energy I have spent trying to understand love. Perhaps I believed my concepts and definitions of love would help me “do” it better or make it more safe. No such luck. I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love. I do not think we were ever meant to. We are meant to participate in love without really understanding it. We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery.
It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. (19)
Love – like worship – is a practice – something we do – a mystery that we are not intended to ever fully understand in our cognitive nature.
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