Love One Another

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
_{Bible, John 15:12}

What is love? Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for a rose to say, “I shall offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people?” Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could do that only by ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature, even to the one who seeks to cut it down.

So this is the first quality of love: its indiscriminate character. Contemplate in astonishment the sheer goodness of the rose, the lamp, the tree, for there you have an image of what love is all about.

How does one attain this quality of love? Anything you do will only make it forced, cultivated and therefore phoney, for love cannot be forced. But there is something you can drop. Observe the marvellous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good or bad, as saints and sinners, and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant. You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness.

Sin occurs, not as we mistakenly think, in malice, but in ignorance. Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. To see this is to acquire the indiscriminate quality one so admires in the rose, the lamp and the tree.
_{Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love}