Merton Monday: Loving another person for who they are

“To love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own.”

–Thomas Merton (Disputed Questions. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, Publishers, 1953, 104)