An ideal can only sustain a person for so long. 

You know the story: a young person with a good heart and a noble vision dives head first into a complicated problem: human trafficking, homelessness, global poverty. After a few months or years, now with a better grasp on the problem, the ideal looks farther away than ever. Discouragement and disillusionment follow.

If idealism fails, what works? What can sustain mercy efforts when progress is nonexistent or difficult to measure? What gets one out of bed in the morning to face another day of what outwardly appears to be failure? 

Only love.

But like so many things in the spiritual life, love can’t simply be willed. At least not very well nor for very long. It has to be grown. And prayer is the garden where love is cultivated. 

In prayer we discover we are loved first. In prayer our compassion grows not by grit but by grace. In prayer our love is sustained, for God — and not any ideal — is the fountain of living water. 

In last week’s webinar, Pete Greig quoted Mother Teresa as an example of someone motivated by love and sustained by prayer: ​“We are not social workers, we are real contemplatives in the heart of the world.” 

That quote led me to a 1982 commencement address Mother Teresa gave to students at Niagara University. As you’d expect, she spoke about serving the poor. But that’s not how her speech began. 

First she prayed to receive love. Then she remarked that the day she spoke fell on the Feast of Love, ​“the Feast that we have learned that He loves us.” Then she talked more and more about God’s love until there was no doubt that she was deeply rooted in it.

There isn’t space to quote all that I’d like to from the speech, so I hope you’ll take a moment to read it. But I do want to leave you with one statement:

“And if you really, if you really want to love, as Jesus has loved us, we need to pray, for prayer gives us a clean heart, and a clean heart can see God.”

So, Father, teach us to pray. Fill us with your love so our love to others can be genuine and sustainable.