© 2026, Javier F. Chento

“Teach Me to Love Like You” is a prayer set to the language and energy of a new generation. At its center is a simple but demanding conviction: faith cannot remain inside us. If Christ truly lives in the heart, then something must begin to move—our hands, our priorities, our way of seeing people, our choices about work, service, time, and responsibility. The song asks for a faith that crosses the distance between prayer and life: “Give me labor in my hands, / give me mercy in my eyes.”

That prayer echoes the spiritual journey of Blessed Alberto Marvelli. His diary reveals a young layman who intensely desired holiness but refused to understand holiness as escape from ordinary life. He wanted Christ to transform everything: study, work, friendship, public responsibility, service to people in need, and his involvement in the world around him. After Communion he prayed: “Jesus, give me your will, your firmness of resolution, your immense love for men and their miseries, your total and supernatural sense of the apostolate.”

The song takes that desire and turns it into a contemporary prayer: “Teach me to love like You.” Not simply to feel compassion, but to act; not simply to admire Christ, but to allow his love to take flesh in our own lives. It is a song about becoming available—to God, to other people, and to the needs of the world in which we have been placed.

Lyrics:

I don’t want a holy dream
that never reaches someone’s door.
I don’t want a polished faith
that walks around the wounded poor.
If You are living in my heart,
then my heart has got to move.
So take the little that I have,
and teach me how to love like You.

Not from a distance, not with pride,
not just with words we hide behind.
Give me labor in my hands,
give me mercy in my eyes.

Teach me to love like You,
with a fire that follows through.
Where the lonely feel unseen,
let me step into the scene.
Give me strength to stand and stay,
when compassion has a price to pay.
If Your heart is beating inside me,
teach me to love like You.

Give me Your love for every sorrow,
for every life the world ignores.
For the worker, for the hungry,
for the child behind locked doors.
For the ones who carry questions,
for the ones too tired to pray.
Let me see them as my family,
not as problems in my way.

Make my faith become a passion,
make my prayer become a road.
Let my life be more than motion,
let it help to lift the load.

Chorus.

I know the world is full of noise,
full of anger, full of schemes,
but I won’t just close my window,
I won’t chase a smaller dream.
You have placed me in this moment,
not to hide and not to run.
Every hour of work and service,
let it all be for the One.

Give me firmness in the struggle,
give me patience on the street.
Give me hope that does not vanish
in the shadow of defeat.
Let the servant You are shaping
never chase after control,
but keep mercy, truth, and courage
burning quietly in my soul.

Chorus.

Teach me to love like You.
Just like You.
With a fire that follows through.

— – —

Blessed Alberto Marvelli: A Holiness That Steps Into the World

When we remember Blessed Alberto Marvelli, we celebrate a young Christian whose life challenges one of the most persistent misunderstandings about holiness: the idea that holiness belongs mainly to churches, monasteries, priests, or religious communities.

Alberto was a layman. His road to God passed through the ordinary realities of life—study, work, friendships, social commitment, service, reflection, difficult decisions, and attention to the needs of others. His life reminds us that the world itself can become the place where a Christian vocation is lived.

His diary contains an astonishingly direct declaration:

“I have set myself a goal today to be reached at all costs with the help of God. A high, sublime, radiant, precious, long desired goal… To be a saint, an apostle, charitable, studious, pure, strong.”

There is something deeply youthful in those words. Alberto dreams big. He does not want a half-lived Christianity. He wants his whole life to mean something; but immediately he recognizes that this is not a heroic project he can accomplish by sheer willpower: “You know O Lord, I can do nothing by myself.”

That tension runs through his spirituality: great ambition for holiness combined with complete dependence on God.

When Christ Lives in Us

One of the strongest images in Alberto’s diary is fire.

Writing about receiving Christ in the Eucharist, he describes “a fire that burns” and “a flame that burns and consumes but which makes me so happy.” Then comes the extraordinary sentence: “Jesus lives in me, Jesus is in my heart.”

That experience leads immediately outward.

Alberto does not pray only for private spiritual consolation. He asks Jesus for “your immense love for men and their miseries.”

That is precisely the movement at the heart of the song:

If You are living in my heart,
then my heart has got to move.

This may be one of the most important lessons Alberto offers young Christians today. Encountering Christ and encountering human suffering cannot be separated.

Prayer that never changes the way we see another person is incomplete. Communion should gradually teach us communion with others. The Jesus we receive is the Jesus who sends us toward the lonely, the poor, the exhausted, the forgotten, and those whose dignity is too easily ignored.

For Alberto, this was not sentimental compassion. Love required involvement.

That makes his spirituality deeply resonant with the Vincentian tradition he encountered through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul: people experiencing poverty are not an abstract “social issue.” They are persons to be approached, known, served, respected, and loved.

Faith With Its Eyes Open

Alberto also refused a spirituality that ignored what was happening in society.

He wrote that Christians must develop “a good critical sense of observation” and a capacity for reflection, becoming “really sensitive to all the spiritual, political, social, religious phenomena taking place round about us.”

Those words could have been written for our own time.

We live surrounded by information, outrage, advertising, political conflict, algorithms, entertainment, and endless scrolling. We can know about almost everything and still understand very little.

Alberto asks for something deeper: pay attention. Think. Discern. Do not let other people do all your thinking for you.

Christian discipleship is not switching off our minds. It means allowing faith, reason, conscience, prayer, and reality to speak to one another.

The song expresses the same determination:

I know the world is full of noise,
full of anger, full of schemes,
but I won’t just close my window,
I won’t chase a smaller dream.

For lay Christians especially, this matters. Our vocation unfolds right inside society. In universities. Offices. Workshops. Hospitals. Families. Neighborhoods. Politics. Technology. Culture. Economics. Volunteer organizations. Friendships.

We are not called to abandon the world but to help transform it from within.

More Than Being Busy

Yet Alberto discovered another danger—one especially familiar today.

Busyness can imitate commitment.

He examined himself with painful honesty: “I give the impression of being active… and I go about pointlessly, going around here and there like a wind-mill without getting anywhere.”

He worried that intense activity had come “at the expense of my interior life.”

That is remarkable honesty from someone remembered precisely for an extraordinarily active life.

Alberto understood that even good work can become empty if we stop reflecting, praying, examining our motives, and allowing God to reshape us.

The question is therefore not simply: How much am I doing?

It is: Who am I becoming through what I do?

Am I becoming more attentive? More compassionate? More courageous? More patient? More capable of listening? More willing to remain beside someone when helping becomes inconvenient?

The song asks:

Give me strength to stand and stay,
when compassion has a price to pay.

Sometimes love means doing something dramatic. Much more often, love means staying.

A Lay Saint for Ordinary Mondays

Perhaps Alberto’s greatest gift to us is that he makes holiness feel both demanding and possible.

We do not need another life before beginning.

God can work with this life.

This education.
This job.
This neighborhood.
This friendship.
This society.
This complicated historical moment.

Alberto wanted his intelligence, will, and reason to be fully alive. “The Lord has given me an intelligence, a will, a reason,” he wrote. Therefore, he concluded, “I have to use them, exercise them, make them function.”

That is a powerful vision of lay holiness.

God does not ask us to become less human. God asks us to place everything human in the service of love—our intelligence, skills, profession, creativity, relationships, citizenship, energy, and capacity for action.

So when we celebrate Blessed Alberto Marvelli, we are not simply honoring a good young man from another generation.

We are celebrating a possibility.

The possibility that a young layperson can belong completely to Christ while being completely involved in the world.

The possibility that prayer can become service.

That Communion can become compassion.

That professional life can become mission.

That careful thinking can become responsibility.

That ordinary days can become holy.

And perhaps Alberto’s prayer can become ours:

Jesus, if you live in my heart, do not let me remain unchanged.

Give me your firmness when doing good becomes difficult. Give me your eyes when the world teaches me not to notice. Give me the courage to think deeply rather than simply repeat what everyone else is saying. Keep my activism rooted in prayer and my prayer open to the suffering of others.

And with every ordinary thing I have—my work, my studies, my friendships, my time, my gifts, my vote, my voice, my hands—teach me to love like You.

As we celebrate the feast of Blessed Alberto Marvelli on October 5, may we take the time to know his life more deeply—and, inspired by his example, discover how our own ordinary lives can become places of holiness, service, courage, and love.

Questions for reflection

1. Alberto wrote, “To be a saint, an apostle, charitable, studious, pure, strong.” What might a serious commitment to holiness look like in the ordinary life of a young layperson today?
2. The song says, “If You are living in my heart, then my heart has got to move.” Where do you see the biggest gap between what Christians pray or believe and the way we actually respond to people in need?
3. Alberto believed Christians should be attentive to the “spiritual, political, social, religious phenomena” around them. What realities in our society do you think Christians especially need to notice, understand, and respond to today?
4. Alberto admitted that he sometimes looked very active while feeling that he was “going around here and there like a wind-mill.” Have you ever confused being busy with actually doing something meaningful? What helps us keep action rooted in prayer, reflection, and purpose?
5. The song asks for “strength to stand and stay, when compassion has a price to pay.” What could “staying” with someone or with a difficult situation mean concretely in your own life this week?