Love on a Two-Way Street

"There is no safe investment.  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 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."  C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, page 121.

What a wonderful day, this festival of romantic love!  In the age of social media, we can see hundreds of expressions of such love.  I am so privileged and overjoyed to be the subject and recipient myself of such beautiful expressions of love from my spouse.  Even though such spontaneity is not my strong suit, I love being on the receiving end of such feelings.  And I hope that I reciprocate even a small part of the love I receive.

I am reminded that this devotion is one trip on a two-way street.  As Lewis notes, genuine love is always risky.  And he does not mean the risk of disappointment or abandonment.  Genuine love requires that we suffer with one another in our pain as often as we embrace one another in our pleasure. This is the full, mature understanding of love.  This is the real beauty of love.

Lewis gave this series of talks not long after his civil marriage to Joy Davidman.  He had been a lifelong bachelor, wrapping his heart carefully round with studies of medieval literature and defenses of Christian orthodoxy.  The marriage was ostensibly a way for Davidman to remain legally in Great Britain with her sons.  But clearly Jack and Joy came to something more than a civil agreement.

By 1960 Joy was dead from bone cancer.  Jack Lewis wrote his wrenching bereavement story in A Grief Observed.  For the full effect, one should read The Four Loves and this work back to back.  I have found no greater testimony to the joy and tragedy of human love.

We can protect ourselves from the pain.  We can become so hardhearted that we allow no one in.  And then we will cease to live.  The love and the hurt travel the same road in and out of our hearts.  And that is as it should be.  It is our mortality which brings a particular sweetness and urgency to our loving.  It is our limits that make love such a wonderful transcendence of ourselves and our selfishness.

Lewis wrote his book as a meditation on the statement that God is love.  We who follow Jesus know that today is an opportunity to reflect further on that statement.  And today is a chance to celebrate how God's love in Christ flows through us to our beloved.  It is a privilege to be a pathway for God's love to my beloved.

I love you so much, my darling Brenda.  And I thank our Lord every day for you.