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“Perfection is founded entirely on the love of God: ‘Charity is the bond of perfection;’ and perfect love of God means the complete union of our will with God’s.”
- Saint Alphonsus de Liguori
The Sufi poet Rumi writes much about love, and perhaps the most surprising thing he says about love is that all true love is the love of God.
That is, although we may think we are in love with our partner, we are really in love with divine characteristics which our partner shares with God. Even something so mundane as the love of money is just loving the value which money has, and this is nothing more than loving the ultimate source of all value, i.e., God. This is not to say that our love cannot be perverted into loving things that have no value or that people aren’t sometimes mistaken in their love of things or money over people. We often make these kinds of mistakes. The miser is someone whose love of money becomes so twisted that he loves money more than the things which money can buy. And what do we desire when we are in love but to be united with our beloved? Therefore, saints and mystics have always desired union with God above everything else.
– Christopher Simon
