What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. You do not deserve love just because you want it.

You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. If you think it is natural you are blind. Love is divine only and difficult always. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. “Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. To keep up-to-date with his latest writings, news, musings, and events, subscribe to his newsletter, Witness. He is currently working on his next novel. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Essence, Variety, and The Paris Review, as well as in the critically acclaimed anthologies Four Hundred Souls and The 1619 Project. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. is a Brooklyn-based, award-winning writer. Formerly known as “Son of Baldwin,” Robert Jones, Jr.

The prophets robert jones