On Loving Our Neighbor — and Ourselves (Rewritten)

We now turn to a topic that naturally follows from the previous post: love for our neighbor, and more broadly, love for all created beings. The central idea is this: if our love for God is pure, unselfish, and rightly placed above everything else, then every other form of love will fall into its proper place beneath it. 

When we love God in the highest and fullest sense, all other loves become secondary and take their direction from that primary love. In that case, we come to share God’s own way of loving. We begin to care about what God cares about. Our love flows along the same path as God's love. Whatever God values — whether great or small, material or spiritual — will matter to us in proportion to how well we perceive it and how capable we are of loving it.