In the sixteenth century there was a monk by the name of Dorotheos of Gaza who used a simple diagram to illustrate the connection between loving God and loving people. He asked his followers to imagine life as a circle, with God as a point in the center. Imagine now that the outside of the circle is the world, and the lives of human beings are lines drawn from the outside of the circle to the point in the center. Get the picture?

Now consider this: as you follow a single line from the outside toward God, all the lines come closer together! Dorotheos taught that this is the way human beings relate to God and one another because, he said, “the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.”