Love of God. That is the ultimate. That is life. That is peace. That is power. That is everything. That is the Pearl of Great Price for which a man gives away all he has -- and is thereby infinitely enriched. The "of" is significantly ambiguous. It is not just love FOR God or love FROM God. It is the inseparable unity of both -- necessarily puny from the human side, a transforming flood from the divine side: but necessarily total for both. The mutual totality is the essence. Love is a total giving without reserve. "Love" has many meanings, but its supreme meaning is a perfect two-way union of heart and mind. How do we achieve the exquisite, absolute peace of its perfection? Principally -- almost entirely -- it is simply a yielding and a self-emptying. All good and perfect gifts come from God and must come from God; and love is the ultimate, crowning good. Man cannot create it. Man cannot create anything. He must seek it from above, as a flower seeks life from the sun. Man's contribution is the yearning and the desire: the rigorous self-emptying of everything else: of every other love. That is, every other love that could mar, or obscure, or dilute the perfection of this love. The "love" that pours forth to all creation is the result and flower and fruit of this love: the second commandment, whose fulfillment follows inevitably upon the achievement of the first commandment. The love of God, and it alone, has the power to change fleshliness to spirituality, filth to cleanliness, ugliness to beauty -- if we will only have the wisdom to choose beauty -- and faith and courage to yield ourselves wholly to it without reserve.

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