This stillness is a kind of poverty, a letting go – a letting go of our effort, a letting go of our control; a letting go of the fears and desires that dominate our efforts. In this poverty, we discover how necessary it is for us to be poor in order to love. We cannot love without poverty. We cannot love ourselves without entering into poverty of spirit. This is the first step: giving up, letting go, renouncing the patterns of control and effort and ego, in which most of us have become addictively enmeshed.
(Aspects of Love 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
