A lecture entitled “Loving to Live,” by Grace Bemis Curtis, CSB, was shared with me this week. It has so many wonderful ideas to share, one of which I recall having been mentioned during a prior Plainfield Bible Study or Roundtable – that is, “Everything that’s not love is hate.” I was startled when I first heard this, and this lecture expounds on it a bit: “I thought there was some sort of middle ground you could stand on. But there isn’t. There’s no neutral ground. We’re either loving and experiencing the blessings of love, or we’re hating and suffering the effects of hatred….Whether we realize it or not, we make a choice between some degree of love and some degree of hate every moment of every day. Each thought we think and each act we perform, from motives of love sends forth health, peace, strength, contentment into the stream of life. Each hateful thought or act tears down and destroys….we all mentally talk with ourselves….The mental argument which changes our thinking from selfish hate to unselfed love, is the road to salvation….We start on this road from death to life by really wanting to change our thinking from hate to Love; we go on to become willing to argue with ourselves on the right side; and we end by learning to love.”
A few other specific quotes stood out to me:
• “With only a little love, we live meager, meaningless lives. With the wrong concept of love, we live dissolute, even criminal lives. With normal human affection, we live good lives. With unselfish love for our fellowmen, we live great lives. With true spiritual love, we live glorified lives. When our life expresses divine Love, we live eternally. Divine Love and eternal Life are one.”
• “…if we seem to feel a lack of love, it isn’t due to any shortage of love. There’s always an abundance of love. It’s because an accumulation of selfish thinking is clogging our intake and blocking the free flow of love into our lives. As the ice of material self is dissolved by the warmth of unselfed love, the bounty of divine Love flows freely into our lives and meets our needs.”
• “Love is the strongest force in the world….Love overcomes the most formidable evil….Love is the most precious thing in the world. The rich cannot buy it; the poor cannot beg it, but all can have it who are willing to express it.”
Here is a link to this lecture that is available online: https://cslectures.org/curtis/loving-to-live-curtis.htm