No pilgrim soul can worthily love God.  But when a soul does everything possible and trusts in divine mercy, why would Jesus reject such a spirit? Has he not commanded us to love God according to our strength? If you have given and consecrated everything to God, why be afraid? St. Padre Pio

Let us love God, but with the strength of our arms, in the sweat of our brow. St. Vincent de Paul

Real love is demanding. I would fail in my mission if I did not tell you so. Love demands a personal commitment to the will of God. St. John Paul II

In our awareness as limited human beings, how can we truly love God and others like us—similar to climbing a steep hill littered with landmines. . So if we commit to that journey, we have to be prepared for a lot of failure and temptations to give up. 

St. Vincent expresses this journey in visceral terms, comparing it to a hard day at the gym. In physical training, one can always go further; merely staying at  level a certain level of fitness does not satisfy. Perhaps that is why there is such a high drop out rate at gyms. Even the ads for home gym equipment acknowledge the temptation to quit.

So there’s no getting around it: “real” love is a hard choice. The late pope St. John Paul II makes an interesting connection: “real love” has to do with the will of God. When people talk about the “will of God”, love often doesn’t enter the mix. The will of God has often been understood rather broadly: from destruction of an entire people to a stance of  taking it easy (“Let go and let God”)  It can also be the great cop-out: “Too bad that happened. I guess it was the will of God”.

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Should we strive for perfect love? Absolutely, for this we were created. What can we do? Trying with all our might to be empty; the senses mortified; the memory as free as possible from all images of this world and, through hope, directed toward Heaven; the understanding stripped of natural seeking and ruminating, directed to God in the straightforward gaze of faith; the will surrendered to God in love. But the work of an entire life would not attain the goal were God not to do the most essential. St. Edith Stein

St. Therese of Lisieux relates a touching analogue for the place of “effort” in our attempts to become more loving. She imagines a little child who is becoming more independently mobile at the foot of a staircase. She sees her father at the top of the stairs beckoning to her and tries to climb up to his waiting arms. After repeated failures, the father comes down the stairs, scoops up the little girl into his loving arms.

Like the little girl at the foot of the stairs, I believe we need to achieve that delicate balance between making efforts to become more loving. Overemphasizing one’s role in becoming more loving can easily lead to a kind of hubris, rather than humility. As always, we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

St. Edith’s last statement  in this quote certainly does pack a punch. The first sixty nine words are essentially a list of what to do and how to become more loving (like the little girl’s full effort). The final twenty don’t diminish the importance of those efforts but puts them  in proper perspective; when all is said and done, what is essential is the work of divine Grace. (we know the little girl would have never made it up the stairs)

Note that In the first sentence, St. Edith uses the word perfect—a word that easily gets us off track in matters of the soul.. So what’s the problem with “perfect”? For one, it fails to recognize that only God is perfect and second, it has a way of hooking our ego to exercise control, thus stopping the flow of authentic love. Yes, it gets down to that important virtue of humility, without which we seek ‘perfection in doing the right thing’, we act as we are able to go it alone. Voltaire was correct: “perfect is the enemy of the good”. Strive, by all means, to do the best you can, all the while knowing that without Grace, your efforts will fail to bear fruit.