The difficult love ... agony

Spiritual progress has no other test or expression than our ability to love:

• Unselfish;
• Founded on respect;
• a service;
• Disinterested affection that does not ask to be paid in return.

but most of all

• a sympathy, an empathy, that takes us out of ourselves.

This empathy enabling us to "feel with" the other person and indeed to feel him or her.

Love 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.

That love which is agape discovers that each individual, especially that one who is suffering, is a sacrament of Christ, "another Christ", as St John Chrysostom says.

When perfect love has driven out fear, or fear has been transformed into love, then everything that has been saved will be a unity growing together through the one and only Fullness, and everyone will be, in one another, a unity in the perfect Dove, the Holy Spirit. - St Gregory of Nyssa.

The person without compassion is an obstacle to knowing God. 

Brother, I recommend this to you: "Let the weight of compassion in you weigh the scales down until you feel in your heart the same compassion that God has for the world." - Isaac of Nineveh

For compassion comes in the end to be united with the same compassion that God feels for the world, His 'pathos'.

Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.

"This is the sign by which to recognise those who have arrived at perfection: even if they were to throw themselves into the fire ten times a day for the sake of others, they would not be satisfied."