Daily Reading for October 11 • The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
We are made to love, both to satisfy the necessity of our active nature and to answer the beauties in every creature. By love our souls are married and soldered to the creatures, and it is our duty like God to be united to them all. We must love them infinitely, but in God, and for God, and God in them, namely, all his excellencies manifest in them. When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this world loved too much, but many things have been loved in a false way, and all in too short a measure.
Imagine a river or a drop of water, an apple or a grain of sand, an ear of corn or an herb: God knows infinite excellencies in it more than we. He sees how it relates to angels and to humans, how it proceeds from the most perfect Lover to the most perfectly Beloved, how it represents all God’s attributes. And for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the Author and God the End is to be beloved in it. O what a treasure is every grain of sand, when truly understood! Who can love anything God made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power and glory are in it. What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!
From Centuries by Thomas Traherne (London: Mowbray, 1960).