A Monk’s Secret to True Love
Monk Mindset for Living Well
Monk Mindset 5
Choose Love: Love is Your Purpose
Reflection on the Monk Mindset & Quote
Love is the most fundamental human experience and the ultimate purpose of our lives.
It has the power to both start wars and to create peace. Each one of us loves someone, whether it be our children, family, spouse, or friends.
Love is the firm cement which holds our relationships together. We deeply need it, but we find true fulfilment when love is pure—free of self-interest and hidden motives.
For centuries, people have sought to understand love. The ancient Greeks, for example, categorized it into four types:
Eros - passionate/romantic love
Storge - familial love
Philia - affectionate love
Agape - sacrificial/selfless love
Most of our relationships rely on the first three, often tied to external factors—shared work, social circles, or family bonds.
However, we find our greatest flourishing when we stretch to a transcendent and selfless love - agape love, the same love in which God loves us.
Agape love is rooted in something beyond external factors or how we feel.
All of us have faced situations in which we don’t feel like being kind, forgiving, listening, helping someone else. Feelings like this are natural and normal - even for monks and nuns. The key in moving toward agape love, of moving toward loving others as God loves us, in this simple statement:
Choose love.
That’s right; the deepest and most authentic love transcends the emotions we have for someone and what we feel like doing. It’s essentially a choice when loving is hard.
And how do we get there?
We are strengthened to choose love by doing the other six principles listed in Monk Mindset, especially prayer -- because they build us up in grace to more effortlessly choose what is best for others. Living in this integrated way reduces the friction of loving authentically so it becomes natural and eventually almost effortless.
Put It Into Practice This Week
Close your eyes and call to mind someone you’ve struggled to love lately.
Now envision the next time you encounter them and feel how it may be hard to love them in that moment.
Now, visualize yourself making a conscious choice to override what you are feeling and love this person in an appropriate way in that moment -- maybe that means smiling, listening, helping, or something else.
Commit to yourself now you’ll live this out the next time you see that person.
Follow Us