“Love of our neighbor…the only door out of the dungeon of self”

GEORGE MACDONALD “…who that loves his brother would not arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell than in the glories of heaven?…Love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self…The region of man’s life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his neighbors, his brothers and sisters all, make up the wide world in which alone his spirit can find room. Man’s dungeon is his own self. If he feels it not now, he will yet feel it one day—feel it as a living soul would feel being imprisoned in a dead body…Life is not in knowing that we are alive, but in loving all forms of life. We are made for the All, because God, who is the All, is our life. …In such a life, no man shall lose the consciousness of well being. Far deeper and more complete, God and his neighbor will flash it back upon him—pure as life.” (Unspoken Sermons, First Series, “Love Thy Neighbor”)