Being a Chris­t­ian means learn­ing to love with God’s love. But God’s love is not a warm feel­ing in the pit of the stom­ach. It has def­i­nite char­ac­ter­is­tics we learn in the course of our life, in the behav­ior and teach­ing of the ear­ly monas­tics, as we pon­der over what we can say about God as God deals with us, and final­ly, as we mod­el our own lives on what we have learned.

1987