Eternal love (St. Francis de Sales)

Only Jesus can take a day full of hate
and have it be remembered
as a day of unconditional love.

   Mount Calvary is the mount of lovers. All love that takes not its beginning from Our Savior's Passion is frivolous and dangerous. Unhappy is death without the love of the Savior, unhappy is love without the death of the Savior! Love and death are so mingled in the Passion of Our Savior that we cannot have the one in our heart without the other. Upon Calvary one cannot have life without love, nor love without the death of Our Redeemer. But, except there, all is either eternal death or eternal love: and all Christian wisdom consists in choosing rightly. 

    During this mortal life we must choose eternal love or eternal death, there is no middle choice. 

    O eternal love, my soul desires and makes choice of thee eternally! Ah! come, Holy Spirit and inflame our hearts with thy love! To love or to die! To die and to love! To die to all other love in order to live to Jesus's love, that we may not die eternally, but that, living in thy eternal love, O Savior of our souls we may eternally sing: Vive Jésus! Live Jesus! Amen. 

--St. Francis de Sales,
Treatise on the Love of God,
Book XII, Chapter 13

Image source: William H. Johnson, Mount Calvary, a study for Christ Crucified (1944), https://www.scadmoa.org/permanent-collections/pieces/mount-calvary
Quotation source