Daily Reading for August 21
To love one’s neighbor with perfect love it is necessary to be prompted by God. How can you love your neighbor with purity if you do not love him in God? But he who does not love God cannot love in God. You must love God, so that in Him you can love your neighbor too. God therefore brings about your love for Him, just as He causes other goods. This is how He does it: He who made nature also protects it. For it was so created that it needs its Creator as its Protector, so that what could not have come into existence without Him cannot continue in existence without Him.
From “Four Degrees of Love” by Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).