Cara Mia, if that man has not separated you from the love of God, and he has not, then the only thing keeping hate of him alive is your thought about him. Only your pride keeps him in your memory. Dissolve your pride, and you dissolve your hate. To be still possessed of the hate that pain made is not intelligent. Take care. It can sap your energy to what you know to be your purpose. By being troubled about it, you have already discovered it to be unworthy of your grander aims, and that is the beginning of humility.
God's grace and attraction touch the human person at the most vulnerable points of existence. Response to this movement in our hearts leads us to compassion, joy, celebration and forgiveness. The heart is that which can be attracted, touched, moved, acted upon. It is called affective, able to be affected, inasmuch as it is drawn and does not move under its own power. Those who act from the heart, moved by God to compassion, become signs of God's love and tenderness. This is the significance of the affirmation that the person is the heart. Created in the image of God, a God who is all love and compassion, we act in harmony with our nature when we manifest the qualities of the heart that are revealed to us in weakness, not in our strength. The seeds of the divine life within and the capacities of the human heart are found in weakness. A blessed weakness this human heart!
~ from A BLESSED WEAKNESS: THE SPIRIT OF JEAN VANIER AND L'ARCHE by Michael Downey
