above all, love each other deeply.

Love, after all, is the only way God can be known. In the stillness of prayer, the heart and the will can accomplish what human reason never could attain. While God cannot be thought, God can be loved, the Cloud author declared. This capacity of love to grasp what the mind cannot is emphasized repeatedly in the tradition. "Love,” says Merton, "enters the darkness and lays hands upon what is its own! Love astounds the intellect with vivid reports of a transcendent Actuality which minds can only know, on earth, by a confession of ignorance. And so, when the mind admits that God is too great for our knowledge, love replies: 'know Him.'"

"Christianity is the only major world religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusual it is as an image of God." Churches sometimes offer Christian education classes under the title "Why Did Jesus Have to Die?" This is not really the right question. A better one is, "Why was Jesus crucified?" The emphasis needs to be, not just on the death, but on the manner of the death. To speak of a crucifixion is to speak of a slave's death. We might think of all the slaves in the American colonies who were killed at the whim of an overseer or owner, not to mention those who died on the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. No one remembers their names or individual histories; their stories were thrown away with their bodies. This was the destiny chosen by the Creator and Lord of the universe: the death of a nobody. Thus the Son of God entered into solidarity with the lowest and least of all his creation, the nameless and forgotten, "the offscouring [dregs] of all things" (1 Cor. 4:13).