Love the Unlovable

We will always have to deal with someone we don’t like, at church, at work, maybe in our own family. Here’s some good advice from Lorenzo Scupoli, (1530 – 28 November 1610) who was the author of Il combattimento spirituale (The Spiritual Combat), one of the most important works of Catholic spirituality.

“If thy disturbance of mind proceeds from a person who is so disagreeable to thee, that every little action of his annoys or irritates thee, the remedy is to force thyself to love him, and to hold him dear; not only because he is a creature formed by the same sovereign hand as thou art, but also because he offers thee an opportunity (if thou wilt accept it) of becoming like unto thy Lord, who is kind and loving unto all men.”

“These things I command you, that you love one another.” John 25:17

For more about loving one another see:

Little Children, Love One Another

Love One Another

Perfect Love

Loving Near and Far

“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar;  for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.  And this commandment we have from him;  whoever loves God must also love his brother.”  1 John 4:20

The quote below by Elizabeth Charles was included in my devotional reading. Elizabeth was an Anglican author. Her works include The Voice of Christian Life in Song; or, Hymns and Hymn-writers of Many Lands and Ages (1859), The Three Wakings, and Other Poems (1859), Wanderings over Bible Lands and Seas (1862), The Early Dawn (1864), Winifred Bertram and the World She Lived In (1866), Poems (1867), The Draytons and the Davenants (1867), Songs Old and New (1882), and Conquering and to Conquer/The Diary of Brother Bartholomew. Our Seven Homes (1896) is autobiographical. A number of her hymns appeared in The Family Treasury, edited by William Argnot(1808–1875).

“It requires far more of the constraining love of Christ to love our cousins and neighbors as members of the heavenly family, than to feel the heart warm for our suffering brethren in Tuscany or Madeira.  To love the whole church is one thing;  to love–that is, to delight in the graces and veil the defects–of the person who misunderstood me and opposed my plans yesterday, whose peculiar infirmities grate on my most sensitive feelings, or whose natural faults are precisely those from which my natural character most revolts, is quite another.”

Can you love all Christian brothers and sisters, near and far?