Love - a hard teaching

"Beginning to Live"
Love alone of all things is sufficient unto itself. It is its own end, its own merit, its own satisfaction. It seeks no cause beyond itself and needs no fruit outside of itself. Its fruit is its use. I love simply because I am love. That is my deepest identity, what I am created in and for. For me to love others “in God” is to love them for their own sake and not for what they do for me or because I am psychologically healed and capable. Our transformed consciousness sees another person as another self, as one who also is loved by Christ with me and not an object separate from myself on which I generously bestow my Christian favors. If I have not yet loved or if love wears me out, is it partly because other people are seen as tasks or threats instead of extensions of my own suffering and loneliness? Yet are they not in truth extensions of the suffering and loneliness of God? When I live out of this truth of the love-that-I-am, I will at last begin to live.
- Richard Rohr, from “Image and Likeness: The Restoration of the Divine Image”

When I first started reading this piece, I began congratulating myself smugly for loving others. Then I realized that I only love - in this way- those that I actually LIKE. The people who are most difficult to get along with or who annoy me are not easy to love, and this teaching is hard for that reason. It is precisely these, who are most difficult to love, in whom I must see "extensions of the suffering and loneliness of God". Furthermore, I need to see that love cannot come out of my own ego. I should not love because I am capable or because I might consider myself better than others, or because they might love me back, but only because God first loved me . Easy to say and very hard to do.