eir attempts to learn to love find
no encouragement. Because they are being prevented from learning to love
their parents and others, they are being prevented also from learning to
love God in and through them. Our Lord's response to the gifts brought
to Him demonstrates the kind of responses we should make to one another.
Even when people's gifts were poorly motivated and ill-chosen, He was
able to look behind them and see and understand the person who gave.
Although Zacchaeus seemed to be motivated only by curiosity, our Lord
invited him to come down out of the tree and asked that He might have
dinner with him, thus moving behind the greed that had made Zacchaeus a
publican.[15] And because our Lord was able to accept the gift of Mary
Magdalene, her true love was called forth.[16] So it is with us. Our
offerings often are pitiful and ill-chosen, but He looks upon the heart
and sees there that really we are trying to express our love despite our
ill-chosen means of doing so.

If we are to participate in the life of Christ and be the instruments of
His love, we must learn to be hospitable to one another's efforts to
express love. Parents need to look upon the hearts of their children and
see deeply what they are trying to express. Husbands and wives likewise
need to look behind the externals of behavior. What we do on the outside
often fails to represent truly and adequately what is on the inside. We
all need encouragement to love, and hospitality toward human attempts to
express love is one of the surest ways in which we can participate in
the contemporary living of Christ in the world.

_Some Disciplines of Love_

Now there are some disciplines that we need to follow as we engage in
the dialogue of love. First, there is the discipline of giving oneself.
It is the discipline of keeping oneself responsible for and to one
another, responsible in facing issues and in making decisions. The only
way to love is to communicate love by word and action. We may learn to
use our power of being to speak and act the word of love. We should
refuse to withhold it for any reason, including our fear of speaking it.
Of course, there is risk in giving ourselves. Our gift of love may not
be accepted, may not be appreciated, and may even be exploited. In
giving love we may be hurt because of the nature of others' responses.
But we will be stronger for having given it, and others may be called
forth by it. Life cannot remain the same wh