Another prayer to read patiently, gently and with inward honesty.

Below is Kierkegaard's prayer as he sets out to write The Works of Love. It's a long time since I read Kierkegaard, and I have to confess I've picked up Works of Love more by accident than design, which could mean more by providence than accident! He is never a comfortable read, always subversive of the ego's search for affirmation and critical of its imaginative strategies to secure opportunities for self promotion, self-comfort, and self advancement into the places of human power and praise.

Geroge Pattison in the introduction encorages a reading one by one of these discourses, each to be considered as effectively a series of scripts for self examination, requiring a response of intentional transformation. This takes place under the discipline of a Love that is the sum and substance and source of all other genuine loves, which are made real in acts, works and habits of performance, sustained by the eternal energy core in the life of the Triune God.

How could love be rightly discussed if You were
forgotten, O God of Love,

source of all love in heaven and on earth,

You
who spared nothing but gave all in love,

You who are love, so that one
who loves is what he is only by being in You!

How could love properly be
discussed if You were forgotten,

You who made manifest what love is,

You, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave Yourself to save all!

How could
love be rightly discussed if You were forgoteen, O Spirit of Love,

You
who take nothing for Your own but remind us of that sacrifice of love,

remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself!

O Eternal Love, You who are everywhere present

and never without
witness wherever You are called upon,

be not without witness in what is
said here about love or about the works of love.

There are only a few
acts

which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love,

but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an
act of love–

sincere in self-renunciation,

impelled by love itself,

and
for this very reason claiming no compensation.