On The Neighbor-Love

You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I tell you: your neighbor-love is the highest love one can provide.

There are people who have encountered the dark fervor of corruption, their bodies and minds whipped and cracked. Many of them lost the ability to love themselves. But those who sublimate their ache and absence into unfiltered love for their neighbors are a miracle.

This is grace.

And there are people who love their neighbor because they were never loved. Love is a special but fleeting thing, capable of breathing life into walking corpses.

To be unloved but choose to love anyways is not virtue-as-compensation but virtue as emergence.

The same contorted soul breathing life into others, even if not given to itself.

An active process of creating a better world, this is the highest act of human power.

To sublimate suffering into love is an act of moral brilliance, and we should tremble.

For the few capable of this are walking mirrors reflecting our moral shortcomings.