The pilgrim Dante's journey teaches him that the source of all the chaos and misery is disorded desire. If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions. To harmonize with the will of God requires us to overcome our passions and our ego, to make room for the transforming love of God. Out of the ashes of his destruction, Dante the poet erected a monument to redemption--his own and everyone else's; he could not have done it any other way. To clear the pathway to paradise, Dante had to heave his own considerable ego out of the way. 

The poet's personal story does not have a conventional happy ending. Dante died in exile, never returning to his hometown. But as we will discover on the road ahead, Dante's story ends not with happiness in the ordinary sense but with something much better: joy. 

Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life, pp. 39-40

Dante taught me that all sin comes from disordered love: loving the wrong things, or loving the right things too little or too much. Family is good. Place is good. Tradition is good. But these things are only good insofar as they reveal and guide one to God. To place anything above God is to make it an idol — and our idols inevitably tyrannize us.

Rod Dreher, "A Tale of Two Photos"

At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other two. I know it sounds a little strange, but we might almost say that the persons within God show each other divine hospitality. After all, John's Gospel tells us that the Father is "in" the Son and that the Son is "in" the Father, and that each loves and glorifies the other. The fathers of the Greek church called this interchange the mystery of perichoresis and added in the Holy Spirit--the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.

Supposing that hospitality means to make room for others and then to help them flourish in the room you have made, I think we could say that hospitality thrives within the triune life of God and then spreads wonderfully to the creatures of God. The one who spreads it is a mediator, a person who "works in the middle." We ordinarily think of Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation, but I think we can see now that those mysterious places in the New Testament that speak of creation happening "through Christ" reveal that the agent of redemption is also the agent of creation. Christ is the person designated to work in the middle both times.

The Scriptures do not explain how Christ mediates at Creation, or exactly why, but they do give us hints. They say, for example, that Christ is not only the Son of God but also the "wisdom of God" and the "word of God." These metaphors suggest that the work of Jesus Christ represents the intelligence and expressiveness of the triune God. According to God's intelligence, the way to thrive is to help others to thrive; the way to flourish is to cause others to flourish; the way to fulfill yourself is to spend yourself. Jesus himself tried to get this lesson across to his disciples by washing their feet, hoping to ignite a little of the Trinitarian life in them. The idea is that if--in a band of disciples, in a family, in a college--people encourage each other, pour out interest and goodwill upon each other, favor each other with blessings customized to fit the other person's need, what transpires is a lovely burst of shalom.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living

Marriage is an institution that elevates us and ennobles us, that helps us aspire to a kind of greatness that we still—despite our attempts to obscure it—can glimpse today. We can always love another person. We can commit ourselves with the single-mindedness of devotion and discover that there are depths to ourselves and one another that we might never have known otherwise. Our marriages can get better—but only if we learn their meaning and begin to submit to their moral demands.

Treating same-sex and different-sex erotic relationships as equivalent removes from eros the glorious possibility that we might discover a love stronger than death, that a man and a woman might be so devoted to one another alone that they would form a community whose children would be icons of their exclusive, permanent commitment. That glorious aspiration and the hope of its fulfillment make us vulnerable to nearly infinite depths of sorrow and loss. But they also make the world a more exciting, dramatic, and beautiful place to live.

Matthew Lee Anderson, "Why I Am Opposed to Gay Marriage"

Eve to Adam:

     With thee conversing, I forget all time,
     All seasons, and their change; all please alike.
     Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
     With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun,
     When first on this delightful land he spreads
     His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
     Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertil Earth
     After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
     Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
     With this her solemn bird, and this fair Moon,
     And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
     But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends
     With charm of earliest birds; nor rising Sun
     On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flowr,
     Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
     Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night,
     With her solemn bird; nor walk by moon,
     Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet.

Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 639-56

Love is the widest, choicest door into the passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it -- out of all proportion and sense. And when He rose again, He stood up like a man indeed: with glorious scars -- and with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature. 

It is through that Sacred Humanity--and through the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself--that He will, at the last day, change these corruptible bodies of ours, make them like His own glorious Body and, through them, draw all things into the last City of their being. The world will be lifted, as it was always meant to be lifted, by the priestly love of man. What Christ has done is to take our broken priesthood into His and make it strong again. We can, you see, take it with us. It will be precisely because we loved Jerusalem enough to bear it in our bones that its textures will ascend when we rise; it will be because our eyes have relished the earth that the color of its countries will compel our hearts forever. The bread and the pastry, the cheeses, the wine, and the songs go into the Supper of the Lamb because we do: It is our love that brings the City home. 

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

I love this sermon illustration by Helmut Thielicke (given by Wesley Hill [full post here]):

I once knew a very old married couple who radiated a tremendous happiness. The wife especially, who was almost unable to move because of old age and illness and in whose kind old face the joys and sufferings of many years had etched a hundred runes, was filled with such gratitude for life that I was touched to the quick. Involuntarily I asked myself what could possibly be the source of this kindly old person’s radiance. Otherwise they were very common people and their room indicated only the most modest comfort. But suddenly I knew where it all came from, for I saw these two speaking to each other and their eyes hanging upon each other. All at once it became clear to me that this woman was dearly loved. And it was as if she were like a stone that has been lying in the sun for years and years, absorbing all its radiant warmth, and now was reflecting back cheerfulness and warmth and serenity.

Let me express it this way. It was not because she was this kind of a cheerful and pleasant person that she was loved by her husband all those years. It was probably the other way around. Because she was so loved, she became the person I now saw before me. 

This thought continued to pursue me and the more it pursued me the more it lost all its merely edifying and sentimental features, until finally they were gone altogether. For if this is true, then I surely must come to the following conclusion. If my life partner or my friend or just people generally often seem to be so strange and I ask myself: “Have I made the right marriage, the right friendship; is this particular person really the one who is suited to me?”—then I cannot answer this question in the style of a neutral diagnosis which would list the reasons for and against. For what happens then is that the question turns back upon myself, and then it reads: “Have I perhaps bestowed too little love upon this other person, that he has become so cold and empty? Have I perhaps caused him to become what perhaps he really has become? The other person, whom God has joined to me, is never what he is apart from me. He is not only bone of my bone; he is also boredom of my boredom and lovelessness of my lovelessness.”

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man