Sample from this e-book

"Call it not love that changeth"

I once spoke to a group of high school girls at a luncheon in Minneapolis. After my talk I answered questions, and the girl who presided asked, “You’ve used the word love many times. What does love mean to you?” I gave her a straight answer: “When your boyfriend’s welfare means more to you than your own, you are in love.” She turned to the rest of the gathering and said candidly, “Well, I guess none of us has ever been in love.”

I think that can be said of most people. If you look at popular novels, gossip magazines, syrupy soap operas, and movies, you come away with the impression that falling in love is something that just happens. Here you are, sauntering down Fourth Street minding your own business, when suddenly you spy a certain someone coming out of a shop and you fall in love as if into a manhole. True love is much harder to come by than that.

The mystics are the world's authorities on love. When Saint Teresa says "Amor saca amor," she is giving us the basic principle: "Love begets love." One of the most beautiful things about love is that even today it cannot be purchased. It cannot be stolen, it cannot be ransomed, it cannot be cajoled, it cannot be seduced. Amor saca amor: only genuine love begets love.

All of us have been conditioned, even though we may not put it in such crass terms, to believe that if you love me six units, I should love you at most six units in return. I can feel secure in loving you six units because you have already committed yourself that far. But if you get annoyed with me and stomp out, slamming the door, I should get annoyed in return - and pull back, at least temporarily, my six units of love. This is the type of bargain that more and more so-called lovers strike today. Saint Teresa would say uncompromisingly, "Don't pretend that this is love. It falls more accurately under the heading of commerce." Shakespeare put the matter in perfect perspective: "Call it not love that changeth."

The whole thrust of what Teresa is confiding to us is simple: With practice, everyone can learn to love like this; everyone can live in endless love. After all, even if you don't learn Esperanto, your life is not necessarily going to be dull and drab. Even if you are not intimately acquainted with ancient Sumerian sculpture, you can make it through life without suffering serious depression. But if you do not learn how to love, everywhere you go you are going to suffer.