Christian Heritage - June 26 - Life to Me Means Christ

In all our actions and thoughts let us be intent more on the love of God than on knowledge and disputation. For love delights the soul and calms the conscience, drawing it away from the enjoyment of lesser delights and from the pursuit of our own glory. Learning without love does not lead to everlasting salvation but puffs up and ends in the most wretched ruin. Let our soul be courageous, then, in undertaking hard tasks for God; let it have the wisdom to savor heavenly things, not earthly; let it long to be enlightened by eternal wisdom and inflamed by that sweet fire that stirs us to love and desire the Creator alone and enables us to spurn all that is transitory. So far as transitory things are concerned, let us take comfort only in the fact that they do not last. In this present age we have no permanent resting place, but are ever seeking one that is to come not made by human hands, and we cry out: Life to me means Christ, and death I regard as a gain.

Richard Rolle (AD 1300-1349), The Fire of Love 5, 157-160

This is simply an awesome quote, worthy of some frutiful lectio divina. Richard Rolle was an English hermit and mystic.