It is only by fidelity in little things that a true and constant love of God can be distinguished from a passing fervour of spirit.
François Fénelon, Letters and Reflections

The moment when we recognize the loved one is indeed glorious. We are exultant in the radiance of love and can do little else but offer ourselves unceasingly to its embrace. This applies to human affection, concentrated in the experience of falling in love with someone. The joyous abandon seldom lasts long as we see more clearly into the nature of the beloved - and also into our own need for clutching on to another person in order to complement our own psychological inadequacies. There is something faintly ridiculous about the experience of falling in love when we think about it later on in the cold light of reason. And yet it remains a very important component of one's personal growth. "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all", wrote Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam. Samuel Butler parodied this well-known text in The Way of All Flesh: "Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all." Both sentiments are profoundly true.

Until one has known the passion of love, one remains enclosed in oneself. One's life may have been a model of propriety, but the heart remains cold and uncharitable. Once one has allowed one's soul to be vulnerable to the attraction of another person, one has also allowed the greater love of God entrance into one's heart, which becomes warm and palpitating. The entrance of the Holy Spirit into one's life allows the imagination to soar into the infinity of nature, and enormous creative acts of art and generosity become possible. The tenor of one's normal life may be ludicrously disrupted, but one has glimpsed the eternal within the temporal and one's scale of perception will never be as it was before. If this is so of human affection, it is even more true of the sudden experience of God's love that brings in its wake a conversion to the light and a self-giving for the Faith.

The period of intense affection, likened to the honeymoon after marital union, gradually tails away into the humdrum round of daily life. The spouse shows irritating features; likewise, God seems to have forgotten us, and his apparent neglect tries our patience while testing our faith. The test is to proceed onwards, looking less for divine favours and more for strength to proceed in the day's work. It is thus that the reliable, if human and fallible, spouse supports the marriage partner. Likewise the divine providence never fails, provided we play our part in service to God and our fellow creatures. There does come a time, however, when we feel thoroughly let down, our faith is at a low ebb, and we are all for throwing in our hand and quitting on a note of disillusion and even despair. It is now that we prove the authenticity of our original love of the person, or our fervour of commitment to God. Like Job, we may have to lose everything and rail against our fate in unmeasured vehemence, but we must proceed onwards.

What we have to lose is, in fact, our self-centred view of life, that the human beloved and God are here to serve us. Once the ego has been civilized into willing service instead of petulant complaint and childish dominance, we can proceed onwards in equanimity, playing our part day by day in fidelity both to God and our human partner. The love of God is the basis of all that exists, while our love for God is its own reward. In its undemanding embrace we are in heaven now no matter how hard may be the external circumstances. It is in the little things of life that we show our affection most beautifully to those close to us: "Anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me" (Matt. 25.40).

May I never, Lord, in the exciting thrust of the present attainment, lose sight of the final goal by neglecting the small things of human relationships and of worship.