How do we love those closest to us then? I think the first way is that we must learn to see the relationship, the close, intimate relationship, as a kind of a ground on which we stand with the other. We stand together in that relationship. In other words, it isn’t my relationship; it is the relationship that unites us. We stand as equal sharers in the mystery of that sacred ground. Very often, those close relationships in our lives, we didn’t choose. Very often, we see them as gifts, people or communities that come into our lives as the sacred gifts of God, manifestation of the nature of God through human relationship. So we need to be able to see our relationships with those closest to us no longer from this egocentric point of view that I am at the centre of the relationship (this is my relationship, this is my wife, my husband, my friend, my brother or sister) but that the relationship enfolds us all. The first step, I think, in learning to love those closest to us is to realise that the relationship doesn’t belong to anyone within it, but it is the ground in which we are growing beyond our own egos.
(Aspects of Love 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
