Charity

"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 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 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... 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 armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."

So said C.S. Lewis in the Four Loves, a book I picked up at Borders tonight. When Lewis uses the word love in the passage, he means not simply romantic love. Lewis specifically talks about, in this chapter, Christian charity. Sometimes I think it would be easier to throw away all forms of love, to leave your heart shut up in a casket. But that is not what Christ calls me to do. His love for us was filled with pain, suffering, and anguish - it wasn't just pretty red valentine cards and warm fuzzy feelings and boxes of chocolate with the words "I love you" scrawled on them. Our love is so weak compared to His!

Yet it is a risk. To love anything or anyone in this world is an opening for pain, an opening for suffering that is there because of sin.

Lewis addresses St. Augustine, that says we should only really open our heart to God, because people can fail us. Yes, people can fail us, Lewis says, but it is much better to suffer than not to love. God calls us to love, no matter what that may mean. Sometimes love isn't a box of chocolates. Sometimes it's "taking up your cross and following" through the desert as well as the valley.

I'm trying to think of a positive way to finish this post. How about the verses that exhort us to let love continue, to love as God loves, to walk like Him...

Father, we need you now, we need your love. The world needs your love. Let me be your love to others... let me take up my cross and follow you, even if that means, yes, ironically, love - and all its sufferings, pain... For I am in love Himself. What more could I want?