For a few minutes we sat there petting the kittens, saying nothing. But every so often I glanced at Demetrios. His big, thick, wrinkled hands cradled the animal lovingly as he stroked its fur in repetitive waves from the neck on down. Then he looked up and sighed.
"Touch everything this way."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Try to love everything. Everything wants love, just like these ghatakia (kittens). Let your love flow--let it be constant, like the seasons. . . . We are called to love people, birds, beasts, trees, seas, stars . . . all the universe wants to be cherished!"
Teilhard de Chardin says that the universe will be "unified only through personal relations." It will become one only under the influence of love. Teilhard calls this the "amortization" of the universe, the healing of the world by loving. Only love has the capacity to transform the individual parts of our lives and world into a living cum-unus. Nothing else can do it. . . "Love," says Teilhard, "is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces." How much truth and energy are we losing, he asks, by neglecting our "incredible power to love"?