C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. (re-read)

One of my favorite passages from the book.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. 

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness.  It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man."  Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.  If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he as not.  We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
 

“For when she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used.  For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.”

-Wendell Berry, “A Consent”

Simon liked gooey, fruity candies. Tropical flavored Starbursts. Green apple Airheads. Skittles warmed in his pant's pocket. Tonya preferred her chocolate chilled. Refrigerated candy bars with almonds or peanuts. Neither flossed regularly. The toothache both woke up with that Tuesday morning brought them together in the dentist's waiting room. And they lived happily ever after.


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