If love is denied or weakens, if one falls away from love, it is pride (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, worldly pride-1 John 2:16). Love, as the life of God--in that life there is no pride... God gives that love, God makes man part of that love and that communion is the Church. Thus, in the Church, there are no rights, nor connected with those rights, no equalization. No equalization, hence no comparison--which is the main source of pride. The call to perfection addressed to each person is the call to find one's self, but not by comparing, not by self-analysis (where is my potential?) but in God. Hence, a paradox: one can find one's self only by losing one's self and it means in identifying one's self totally with God's calling, design for one's self revealed not in one's self but in God! To love--one's self and other--with God's love: How needful this is in our time when love is almost completely misunderstood. How profitable it would be to think more carefully and more deeply about the radical particularity of God's love.... the absence of the sentimentality with which the world and Christianity have usually identified that love. In God's love, there is no promise of earthly happiness, no concern about it. Rather, that love is totally submitted to the promise and the concern about the Kingdom of God, that is, the absolute happiness for which God has created man, to which He is calling man. Thus, the first essential conflict between God's love and the fallen human love. 'Cut off your hand,' 'pluck out your eye,' 'leave your wife and children,' 'follow the narrow way...'--all of it is so obviously irreconcilable with happiness in life. This is what turned off this world from total love and what filled it with hatred. But--and this is so important--the world became turned off when in the Church itself something changed, something was 'turned off.' But about this I might write some other time...