The Circle of Love
Reading " To Love and Pray " by Roberta C Bondi
Lent to me by a friend. It was the best expounding on the love of Christ and it's role in our prayer life. He sees love and prayer as the basis, the way of life. And not so much interest in how we should love or how we should pray but the situations and reasoning behind it.
In particular, I am struck by the description of our love for God and neighbour by one of the ancient Egyptian monks.. Dorotheos of Gaza.
Imagine he asks, thay we have drawn a circle with a compass. God is at the centre, where the point of the compass went. Now imaging that the outside of the circle is the world, and the lives of human beings are represented by many straight lines drawn from the outside to the centre. Notice how as you follow a single line from the outside toward God, all the lines come closer together. This is the way human beings relate to God and to each other, for
" the close they are to God, the closer they become to one another and
the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God"
The diagram works in reverse as well. If you follow a single line from the center out to the edge again, you notice that all the lines become farther apart as they go away from the centre. This, Dorotheos says is because
" this is the very nature of love. The more we are turned away from the do not love God, the
greater the distance that separates us from our neighbour. If we were to love God more,
we should be closer to God, and through love of ( God ) we should be more united in love to our
neighbour ; and the more we are united to our neighour the more we are united to God."
Lent to me by a friend. It was the best expounding on the love of Christ and it's role in our prayer life. He sees love and prayer as the basis, the way of life. And not so much interest in how we should love or how we should pray but the situations and reasoning behind it.
In particular, I am struck by the description of our love for God and neighbour by one of the ancient Egyptian monks.. Dorotheos of Gaza.
Imagine he asks, thay we have drawn a circle with a compass. God is at the centre, where the point of the compass went. Now imaging that the outside of the circle is the world, and the lives of human beings are represented by many straight lines drawn from the outside to the centre. Notice how as you follow a single line from the outside toward God, all the lines come closer together. This is the way human beings relate to God and to each other, for
" the close they are to God, the closer they become to one another and
the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God"
The diagram works in reverse as well. If you follow a single line from the center out to the edge again, you notice that all the lines become farther apart as they go away from the centre. This, Dorotheos says is because
" this is the very nature of love. The more we are turned away from the do not love God, the
greater the distance that separates us from our neighbour. If we were to love God more,
we should be closer to God, and through love of ( God ) we should be more united in love to our
neighbour ; and the more we are united to our neighour the more we are united to God."
Comments