You Were Made to Love More

As man's sense of 'oneness' enlarges and unfolds, he experiences growing conceptions of 'justice' and right.

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Transcript

The silk merchant's son stood before the leper, trembling. Every instinct told him to run. His fine clothes, his merchant's pride, his very sense of self recoiled from the disfigured man before him. But Francis of Assisi, in an act that would define his legacy, dismounted his horse, approached the leper, and embraced him.

This was not the Francis who had once fled from lepers in disgust. This was not the privileged youth who danced through Assisi's streets in expensive clothes, dreaming of knightly glory. This was a man being transformed by an expanding circle of love.

"At first man cares only for himself," wrote Yogi Ramacharaka, "all others being 'outsiders.'" And so it was with young Francis. His world was small. His family. His comfort. His ambitions. But like so many before and since, he began to feel the discomfort of a life lived too small.

First, his heart opened to the poor of Assisi. He gave away his father's cloth to clothe them, then gave away his own inheritance to feed them. His circle of care expanded, as Yogi Ramacharaka taught, "to his whole family connections. Then to his tribe." Then, beyond family to embrace strangers. His sense of oneness kept growing.

Love, once unleashed, refuses to be contained. Soon Francis was ministering to lepers, society's ultimate outcasts. The very people he once couldn't bear to look at became his brothers and sisters. The circle grew wider.

Then, his empathy expanded beyond human boundaries entirely. He began preaching to birds, calling them "little sisters." He negotiated peace with a wolf terrorizing a village, addressing it as "Brother Wolf." In his eyes, all creatures became family.

Because, Yogi Ramacharaka wrote, “as man's sense of 'oneness' enlarges and unfolds, he experiences growing conceptions of 'justice' and right. It is not all a matter of the Intellect. The Spiritual Mind rays are becoming brighter and brighter."

Francis's journey from self-absorbed merchant to universal brother shows us what’s possible. It is an example of this natural progression.

Your circle of care can expand too. Each time you extend kindness beyond its comfortable boundaries—to difficult people, to those different from you, to creatures great and small—you participate in this sacred expansion.

The circle grows. And with it, so do you.