Quote of the Week- CS Lewis on Love
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will
be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it
intact you must give it 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. To love
is to be vulnerable.”
“In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few
years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between
certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the
accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any
of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there
are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has
been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me,
but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian
friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one
another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good
taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God
reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous
creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the
universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no
tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed
back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the
mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops,
the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for
breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a
"host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that
we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the
diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”
It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long,
that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly
derived from the sun that shines upon us.”
All Quotes from CS Lewis "The Four Loves"
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