Spiritual Corner - Practising Virtue through Loving Your Neighbour

After the soul has come to know herself, she finds humility and hatred for her selfish sensual passion, recognizing the perverse law that is bound up in her members and is always fighting against the spirit. So she rises up with hatred and contempt for that sensuality and crushes it firmly under the foot of reason. And through all the blessings she has received from me, she discovers within her very self the breadth of my goodness. She humbly attributes to me her discovery of this self-knowledge, because she knows that my grace has drawn her from darkness and carried her into the light of true knowledge. Having come to know my goodness, the soul loves it both with and without intermediary. I mean she loves it without the intermediary of herself or her own advantage. But she does have as intermediary that virtue which is conceived through love of me, for she sees that she cannot be pleasing or acceptable to me except by conceiving hatred of sin and love of virtue.

Virtue, once conceived, must come to birth. Therefore, as soon as the soul has conceived through loving affection, she gives birth for her neighbours' sake. And just as she loves me in truth, so also she serves her neighbours in truth. Nor could she do otherwise, for love of me and love of neighbour are one and the same thing. Since love of neighbour has its source in me, the more the soul loves me, the more she loves her neighbours. Such is the means I have given you to practise and prove your virtue. The service you cannot render me you must do for your neighbours. Thus it will be evident that you have me within your soul by grace, when with tender loving desire you are looking out for my honour and the salvation of your neighbours by bearing fruit for them in many holy prayers. I showed you earlier how suffering alone, without desire, cannot atone for sin. Just so, the soul in love with my truth never ceases doing service for all the world, universally and in particular, in proportion to her own burning desire and to the disposition of those who receive.

Yours,
Fr. Matthew Wang
<An Excerpt from The Dialogue by Catherine of Siena, Chapter 7>