Spiritual progress has no other test in the end, nor any better expression, than our ability to love. It has to be unselfish love founded on respect, a service, a disinterested affection that does not ask to be paid in return, a ‘sympathy’, indeed an ‘empathy’ the takes us out of ourselves enabling us to ‘feel with’ the other person and indeed to ‘feel in’ him or her. It gives us the ability to discover in the other person an inward nature as mysterious and deep as our own, but different and willed to be so by God.
OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism
