Love, and Ever More Love

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Narration: Michael McGowan, Violin: Kristin McGowan

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Adam Smith is usually remembered as the father of modern economics. But long before The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a very different kind of book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a meditation on what it means to be human.

Near the beginning, he wrote:

“To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent, affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.”

Smith understood that something happens when another person's happiness begins to matter to us—not simply because it benefits us, but because we have come to care about the person themselves. Compassion changes the center of our lives. We become a little less concerned with ourselves and a little more attentive to others.

Nearly two centuries later, Dorothy Day put it much more simply:

“Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.”

She went on:

“If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others.”

Love is not simply a feeling or an idea. It asks something of us. It asks us to bear with one another, to forgive, to make sacrifices, and to carry one another's burdens.

And perhaps that is what can sometimes get lost beneath everything else we associate with faith, morality, and being a good person. We can become so concerned with being right that we forget to be kind. We can become so focused on our own shortcomings, or the shortcomings of others, that we forget what matters most.

Love brings us back.

It asks us to look at another person not as a problem to be solved, a mistake to be judged, or someone who has failed to measure up, but simply as another human being—someone with hopes and fears, wounds and joys, strengths and weaknesses, just like us.

This is at the heart of what Jesus taught. When everything else was stripped away, he returned again and again to love: love of God, love of neighbor, love even for those who might seem difficult to love.

And this way of understanding Christianity has deep roots in Ireland. The Christian tradition that grew and flourished there was not simply a matter of belief or doctrine. It was lived in monasteries, communities, places of hospitality, prayer, learning, and care for others. Again and again, Irish Christianity expressed faith not only in what a person believed, but in how that person lived and treated those around them.

Perhaps the purpose of faith is not simply to make us more religious. Perhaps it is to make us more capable of love.

And that is why Dorothy Day's words are so powerful:

“And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.”

Perhaps the great work of a lifetime is not becoming more impressive, more certain, or even more religious, but becoming more capable of love.

Learning to notice another person. Learning to forgive. Learning to suffer with someone. Learning to rejoice in another person's happiness. Learning, little by little, to make room for another person where once there was only ourselves.

Maybe this is one of the gifts of the Irish Christian tradition: the reminder that faith is meant to become something we live. Something expressed not only in prayer, but in hospitality. Not only in belief, but in compassion. Not only in words, but in the way we make room for one another.

Adam Smith called this the perfection of human nature. Dorothy Day called love the solution. Jesus made it the heart of his teaching. And the Christian tradition of Ireland carried that same conviction into the ordinary work of life.

Maybe they were all pointing in the same direction.

Love, and ever more love.