© 2008 Guy de Viron
© 2008 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
What is love for?
Love itself cannot be defined. By the mixture of all qualities, men can produce virtue: they cannot produce Love. All efforts cannot make Love penetrate our nature. Because Love is the effect of a precise cause and the effect is only obtained when the condition is fulfilled. “We love because he loved us first.” The word “because” is important: it introduces the cause that we are looking for. Thus, little by little our heart changes.
Let us fix our gaze on the love of Christ and we will love in turn. Let us contemplate this mirror, let us bear upon ourselves the reflection of the personality of Christ and we will be transformed into his image, from tenderness to tenderness. We cannot love on command. The only way is to have our gaze fixed on the model of all love, to let ourselves be taken by love for him and to become like him. Inevitably, we will resemble him. Love engenders love. It is a phenomenon of induction which will have the effect of creating a real force of attraction. Men will be attracted to us as we will be attracted to them. This is the invariable effect of love.
Whoever puts his trust in the Lord has eternal life, because trust is the road that leads to love. Let us never offer men a petty portion of the Gospel. Let us know how to tell them that Christ came to give men a life more abundant than theirs, abundant in salvation for themselves, abundant in power to alleviate the suffering of the world and work for its redemption. Then, the Gospel will be able to seize the whole man, body, soul and spirit, and give to each element of his person its fulfillment and its reward. Rather than offering peace, let us offer life. Rather than offering faith, let us offer love. In place of justification, regeneration. May our religion plunge us into a true current deeper and more joyful than the life we have lived until now. It is obvious that only a broader and deeper love can compete with the love of the world.
To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love always is to live always. This is why eternal life is inseparably united with love. Life never dries up as long as love is there. Moreover, love is a good that is already part of our present life, and not a good that we must wait for until our death. The saved man is a man who loves and he who remains in love already remains in God. For God is love. We cannot respond to the demands of love without resorting to prayer and meditation, without taking the time and applying it daily!
Let us devote ourselves to this unique good; let us strive at all costs to acquire this transcendent personality in exchange for our own. A man’s religion is ultimately defined by love and not by religiosity, the way in which he has performed the gestures of compassion and love of daily life. When our memory probes the past, it sees emerging, higher than the passing pleasures of life, the supreme hours when it was given to us, unknown to all, to exercise kindness towards those around us, to accomplish regenerative actions for them. casts upon us to the extent that we recognize that what we love is love itself. We are all an incarnation of love and made in its image. Every situation is a source of love provided that we regard it as such.
Just as surely as the power of love can solve any problem that is thrown at it, criticism can make it worse. Describing evil makes it appear tenfold! Describing good makes good tenfold! If we fail to attract the good we desire into our lives, let us learn to spread love; become a radiant center of love and we will discover that love, the divine magnet within us, will completely transform our world. If we overcome a trial with love, we solve our problem which becomes an initiation into love.
The more we talk about love, the stronger it becomes in our consciousness. If we persist in thinking loving thoughts and speaking loving words, we can be sure that our lives will be filled with this immense feeling of love, that of a loving Father. With confidence, we will find that there is nothing that resists its test.
Guy De Viron
(said the Swiss)