The joy of loving

A pure heart can see God,

And if you see God, immediately you begin to love one another.

...

The fruit of prayer is deepening of faith,

the fruit of faith is love,

and the fruit of love is action.

...

O Sweet Mystery,

how tenderly does thou speak...

Make me a channel...

He too has loved--loved God and loved man with a love of peculiar intensity and recklessness. It was love that had made him leap off his horse and kiss the foul and rotting hand of the leper; it was love that had made him abandon for ever the comforts and decencies of his father's house; it was love which had led him by way of poverty and humility and simplicity. Love had driven him on his long journeys in heat and cold, in hunger and thirst; love led him to face almost certain death at the hands of the Saracens; love took him up to the mountaintop to be branded as Christ's. His whole life had been nothing but an expression of love--love of God and love of man--to the end, and to the uttermost.

-John R. H. Moorman, St. Francis of Assisi 

Love: The Confessions of St. Augustine

Love endureth in adversity, 

It rejoices in good deeds, 

It is strong in suffering, 

It is safe from temptation; cheerful among true brothers. 

Love is everything...

Natural law

...
Even today there remain some wild places in Italy, hard of access, savagely beautiful, and assured of a privacy never to be violated by the intrusion of man's all too often clumsily fashioned contrivances -- a rocky bluff, a generously wide shelf of mountain grown all over with thick-girthed trees, the loud anger of a waterfall heard from a distance and the undertones of an unseen rill, some twisting steep path ending at the edge of a surprising patch of even, emerald-green ground, encircled by juniper and tamarisk, suggesting a plate of rare majolica offered on the palm of Atlas -- narrow ribbons of tracks running up and down, pine needles for their carpet and skies for their roof -- not a single evidence of any human habitation but the pulse of life beating richly in tree and water, in birdsong and the unseen footfall of animals, and the majesty of mountain peaks most surprisingly in accord with the tiny pink and blue flowers edging the track. 

In such places, recorded history becomes less than a crumb of a loaf. The earth does not so much belong to man as man to earth. Whether he will or no, he stands subject to the natural law and may, if he so chooses, come to a sense of curious release by virtue of the subjection. However wild the landscape, it is informed by a truth seldom found elsewhere. Also, it promises an enlargement of horizons other than the visible one....

-- John R. H. Moorman

Uncontrolled piety

Such piety seldom pauses to reflect that the genuine manifestations of the supranatural have simplicity for their basis.

- John R. H. Moorman

Nature observer

For Francis the only barrier between man and the rest of creation was fear -- unworthy of man and insulting to the Creator. He held that fear in man engendered fear in the animals he met and that the animal's fear found an outlet in ferocity.

-John R. H. Moorman, Saint Francis of Assisi