Do you know it?
The love for equals is a human thing– of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely.
The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing– the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing– to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is the love for the enemy– love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.
–The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner
I’m only just beginning, I think, to practice this last kind of love, and am good neither at it nor at any of the others. Little else in life has asked so much of me as this last kind, but I have seen Him there– or at least, have come closest to a glimpse. And what I have seen of Him is Beautiful.
