Love Knows No Limits

Fr. Thomas à Kempis said, “Love often knows no limits but overflows all bounds.  Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of troubles, attempts more than it is able, and does not plead impossibility, because it believes that it may and can do all things.  For this reason, it can do all, performing and effecting much where he who does not love fails and falls.”

This is not sentimental language dressed up as spirituality.  It is a direct claim about capacity itself.  Love, properly understood, does not calculate its own limits before acting.  It attempts what exceeds its stated ability, and by attempting, frequently accomplishes it, precisely because the calculation of limitation was never the obstacle love faced.  The person who calculates first, who measures the cost before committing, routinely fails at exactly the task love completes without hesitation.

A Real Life That Tested the Claim

St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, was imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941.  When a prisoner escaped from his block, camp authorities selected ten men to be starved to death in reprisal.  One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in anguish for his wife and children.  St. Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place.  By every rational measure of self-preservation, the act exceeded what any reasonable man should have attempted.  St. Kolbe survived two weeks of starvation in the camp’s death block before being killed by lethal injection on 14^th August 1941.  Gajowniczek survived the war and lived for a further 53 years, attending Kolbe’s canonisation in 1982.  This is what Fr. Kempis described: an act that attempted more than it was able, that refused to plead impossibility, and that accomplished something calculation alone would never have permitted.

Contemporary self-help culture has spent the last decade elevating “boundaries” to the status of a cardinal virtue.  Setting limits, protecting one’s own capacity, declining what exceeds one’s stated bandwidth: all genuinely useful concepts, deployed correctly, against genuine exploitation.  Deployed indiscriminately, they produce something closer to the opposite of what Fr. Kempis describes.  An entire generation has been taught to calculate its own limitations before acting, to treat the phrase “I cannot” as a complete and sufficient answer, and to view any attempt exceeding comfortable capacity as a failure of self-care rather than a possible expression of love.

None of this argues against boundaries where they protect against genuine abuse or manipulation.  It argues against confusing self-protection with love’s character.  Fr. Kempis described what happens specifically when love, not obligation, not manipulation, not guilt, is the motive force behind an action.  Love exceeding its stated limits looks identical, on the surface, to burnout or self-neglect.  The difference sits entirely in the motive underneath it.  St. Kolbe did not sacrifice himself because he lacked boundaries.  He did so because love, correctly ordered, does not consult the calculation of limitation before acting, and the modern instinct to treat every limitation as sacred risks producing a generation incapable of recognising the difference.