Fiat (So Be It)

I have previously cited my admiration of C.S. Lewis on this blog, but I want to reaffirm my affection for him as a human being for having written such a wonderful essay. With many thanks to Elisa, from whom I have shamelessly lifted the text, I offer you this passage on vulnerability, and the cost of love being far less than the cost of not loving. So important for me to remember in days like these. I read this essay before, but I never understood it until today. Lewis says here what I have been trying to say my whole life, but didn’t even know it. It’s hard to understand why people suffer so greatly in ways their fellow man can’t relate to, but the last part of this hits the nail on the head: it is of God’s choosing. Thank you, Master, for the gift of writing, that we may benefit from the knowledge and previous experience of those who have come before.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be 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 has 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.