If words alone are not enough, I can think of two people who had demonstrated it by how they lived. The first is the Blessed Virgin Mary Who served God with unreserved love by accepting the Holy Spirit and giving birth to the Son of God so that we can learn from Him. The second is the Son of God Who served His Father with unconditional love by suffering the manifestations of Evil and giving up His life in order that ours can be saved.
Sadly, man has not learned from the combined lives of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. If man cannot learn by example, then what good will more words do? Perhaps that they could serve as a reminder of the ways the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus served with love.
A reminder, however feeble its effectiveness in changing a man's heart, is perhaps enough if it only acts to remind man just once to examine whether his actions arises purely out of love or the semblance of love for he would then have at least acted with a degree of compunction, even though the completed action was in part, the greater or the lesser, self-serving, and not served humbly with selfless love without guise.
After writing four paragraphs, I have yet to explain what "serve with love" means. Which operative word should be used to explain "serve with love"? I thought of using the word "motive" or "intent" in describing the impetus for one to serve another with love. Then the word "energy" came to mind. Immediately it felt right.
"Energy" is an internally driven force. That force comes much closer in revealing the underlying truth that propels one to act. I do not think that one's focus and energy can be deceived whereas both motive and intent can easily be intellectually manipulated to conceal the truth and are therefore concepts useful in the practice of law but not so in a discourse to reveal it.
Man can rationalize all he wants and conclude that he is serving with selfless love, but he cannot escape the fact that his energy or his drive is instead focused upon and directed at something else, something that results in, for example, an advantage, a potential gain, a certain recognition, an alleviation of guilt, an exercise of power or an elevation of status over others. If indeed that is the case, then however seemingly humanitarian the act, he is serving himself with love rather than God with love.
Since we are sinners, having had the origin of our energy sourced in Purity and Goodness irrevocably contaminated by Satan in the Garden of Eden, we act often in our own selfish interests. That may not be holy but that is the reality. I believe that we have to acknowledge that we are sinners, and that our acts are usually not selfless. That ought to be fine, as long as we do not delude ourselves into believing otherwise, and on the condition that we continually try to act truly selflessly from time to time in the service of God and others. Although fulfilling this condition is not a recompense or a cure for our misguided steps, it nonetheless, I believe, dilutes ever so slightly our energy contaminated by Original Sin. Perhaps such a dilution would be enough for a chance at salvation whereas no dilution would mean no chance at all. An energy consumed by pure Evil without any sense of compunction forever repels Divine Energy that is Pure and all Good. [1] Based on this hypothesis, we by our Free Will choose our ultimate destination by the source of our focus and the direction of our drive in our earthly lives. [2]
Our earthly lives are our realities which can consist of difficult people who are judgmental, vengeful, spiteful, envious or the like, who are often dissatisfied and critical. That quite likely could be us, in addition to a parent or a close relative, a beloved friend or a spouse, a child or a senior, the sick or the handicapped, the mendicant or the drug addict. Even though people so afflicted may not possess the positive energy needed for entry into Heaven, holiness requires the forgiveness and the selfless serving of someone who expects a lot and complains often. With repeated doses of positive energy delivered on a plate served with the kind of love the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus have for God and us, I believe everyone whose energy has been corrupted by Satan will eventually yield to the energy of Purity and Goodness.
When we serve others with pure love, [3] we would bring an energy of Purity and Goodness to those who have lost it and put back in front of them the path to Heaven; at the same time, we would benefit from the same positive energy that we have given to others. If, at times, we ourselves need a dose of Purity and Goodness because our energy is so warped but no one is around to serve us selflessly with love, then we must turn to prayer. When we supplicate, the impossible is possible.
[1] Unlike magnets, these polar opposites do not attract.
[2] In other words, the theory of energy is based on Free Will, a gift to us from God until the very end -- a gift of freedom to choose Heaven or Hell by where and how we focus our energy in our earthly lives.
[3] Today is 11/11/13 and the following is added:
Today I caught the last part of Joel Osteen's sermon. He talked about four types of people, ones who lifts you and makes you feel good about yourself, ones who thrusts you and inspires you to reach your goals and I might add, to realize your dreams, ones who weighs you down and with their problems, expecting you to fix them, holding you down with them and ones who drags you along with them with their negativity, draining your energy, using you as a trash can to dump all their problems. The operative words, lift, thrust, weight and drag are terms Joel Osteen borrowed from his pilot friend who said in order to fly a plane, all of those factors have to be taken into account. Joel Osteen said that the person who weighs you down or drags you along could be your spouse but you would have to let your spouse live the life in negativity if so desired but you ought not to feel responsible and be a co-dependent, that you must break free of the bondage that ties you down so that you could realize the potential God has given you. However, he added that you must continue to respect that person whose negativity you feel responsible for and pray for that person, and that you could allow yourself to be part of the negative drama with that person, but only for a season, not a lifetime.
When I said we ought to serve others with pure love, it was not about living the life of a complainer afflicted with constant dissatisfaction or becoming a part of their lives, allowing yourself to absorb all of their negativity and shoulder all of their burdens. What I meant by serving the negative folks with love is by approaching them with patience, understanding and compassion, detached from the emotional aspects that drain away the energy of Purity and Goodness. This service is not just for a season but for a lifetime. How can one serve with love a parent, a child or a loved one for one season and not the next? As difficult as serving with love is, one must do it again and again, and do it for as long as it takes for Purity and Goodness to make an entry into the darkness of negativity that belongs to Satan so that the Light of God can pierce through and shine forth from within which is when healing starts to take place. For the love of God, one cannot abandon the afflicted. Patience is key. If one is not living under the same roof with the afflicted, one must depart by leaving the afflicted with an assurance that love with return and love will be served again soon. This assurance is a promise that cannot and must not be broken: the expectation created by this promise is equivalent to the expectation of salvation promised by Christ.
Those who are blessed by God have the responsibility to reveal the gift of blessedness to others so that they, too, can follow the path to God and receive their own blessedness and live in the humble hope of salvation, of pure joy and eternal fulfillment. Dissatisfaction would have faded away into nothingness and all the complaints would be a fully forgotten past.
Let us all take the first and the last step, and take as many as possible in between, with pure love propelled by the energy of Purity and Goodness.
To end, I thank Joel Osteen for lifting me up, inspiring me to write this footnote, and confirm that I agree totally with Joel Osteen that we must respect and pray for those afflicted with unshakable negative energy, that God would heal them. A prayer that I would recommend we, and they, say is the prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, in Latin (see http://www.thesacredheart.com/latpray.htm#stmich):
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperat illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae c[a]elestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen
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