Helping One Another to Love — Thomas Merton

But we should be helping one another—let’s put it in simpler words—to love. We help one another to love more, and you help people to love, not by saying “love,” but by loving. That’s the justification of our life: if there is love, it’s justified, and it should not be just a little in-growing love. It should be a love that reaches out to everybody.—Thomas Merton in California: The Redwood Conferences & Letters, (p. 52)

These words of wisdom that Merton offered during his conference talk in California were directed to the members of a Cistercian women’s community in Northern California. However, as with so much of his work, these words must be a part of the life and the work of those who follow Christ in this fractured and fear-filled world where the “church” has too often become the antithesis of the way of Jesus.