Precept and Practice – AUGUST 11 – Love An Efflux

Love is an efflux.   It is the outpouring of our very being into the being which is dear to us.   Yet we are not left impoverished, but enriched beyond the dreams of spiritual avarice.   The state of loving self-abandonment is the only state which is untouched by any breath of cynicism.   Cynicism springs from the calculation of apparent profit and loss, from a suspicion of having bargained badly, whether with God or man.   But love bears with it the consciousness of resources far too infinite for any loss to touch.   There is none so humble, but there is none so proud.

Two or three points may be noted.   First, love should be consciously sacramental, aware, that is, of its communion with a Divine life of all encompassing love, to which nothing is alien.   That is the source of its fidelity, not only through evil but through good report, but through good and evil themselves.   Such fidelity may be mistaken for weakness by the shallow.   But it is supreme strength, and its will is as iron against the false realisation of the soul it loves for what it loves is not a body, but a soul.

(May Kendall)

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From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW