I know your wretchedness, the struggles and tribulations of your soul and the weakness of your sickly body; I know your cowardice, your sins, your dejection, and yet I tell you, “Give me your heart, love me just as you are!”
If you wait to be an angel before abandoning yourself and giving yourself to Love, you’ll never love me. Although you fall over & over into those faults that you would never wish to commit, although you may be so weak in the practice of virtue; I will bear everything, except your refusal to love me.
Florence, Italy.
At every instant and in every state of mind in which you may find yourself, in fervor as in dryness, love me just as you are! I want the love of your needy heart; if you wait to be perfect to love me, you’ll never love me. Am I not able to make of every grain of sand a seraph, radiant in purity, nobility, and love? Could I not, with a single movement of my will, make thousands of saints arise out of nothingness, a thousand times more perfect and lovable than the ones I have created? Am I not the omnipotent one? And if I have wished to leave unmade forever all these marvelous beings, and have preferred your poor love to theirs?Continue reading “love me just as you are!”→
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was filled with sorrow at the tragic death of his wife in a fire in 1861. The Civil War broke out the same year, and it seemed this was an additional punishment. Two years later, Longfellow was again saddened to learn that his own son had been seriously wounded in the Army of the Potomac.
