C.S. Lewis on the mystery of love and supposed "insurances against heartbreak"

If you’ve never read it, make sure you get C.S. Lewis’ book, THE FOUR LOVES. It is available very inexpensively HERE as an e-book. A friend gave me this book when I was a teenager. I cannot put into words what it has meant to me down through the years. Entering into my 38th year as a priest today, I read my favourite passage (pp. 120-127) from the book this morning, which I have always experienced as simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, and I share the following extracts with you. No-one grasps the heart of the Gospel quite like Lewis!

. . . Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of . . . There is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground – because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving? . . .

. . . We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he ‘loved’ . . . Even if it were granted that insurances against heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Christ comes at last to say ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’

. . . 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 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.

. . . 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.

Trusting in the Lord and valuing people more than things - Thursday of the Second Week of lent

FIRST READING (Jeremiah 17:5-10)

Thus says the Lord: "Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

"Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit."

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? "I the Lord search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."

GOSPEL  (Luke 16:19-31)

Jesus said to the Pharisees: "There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Laz'arus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

"The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Laz'arus in his bosom. And he called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Laz'arus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.'

"But Abraham said, `Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Laz'arus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.'

"And he said, `Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.'

"But Abraham said, `They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.'

"And he said, `No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.'

"He said to him, `If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.'"

REFLECTIONS 
God is my help 
(Word of Life Community)

A Witness from Hell 
(From Presentation Ministries)

At any given moment of my life I am either Lazarus, sitting in need at my neighbor's door, or the rich man who ignores my needy neighbour.
(Fr Gregory Jensen)


FURTHERMORE . . .

At the core of human nature is a fundamental dis-ease, a nagging loneliness, an incessant desire for more. St Augustine summed it up beautifully when he said: "You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you". The soul's restless longing for love, for goodness, beauty, and truth, is due to humanity's fundamental longing for God. That is how we are made, and that God-shaped lack can only be satisfied by God, and ultimately we will only find rest "in the bosom of Abraham", in heaven.

As Jesus' reference to the rich man's costly "purple garments and fine linen" suggests, some people hope that wealth and 'retail therapy', drugs, drink, fancy holidays and the latest gadget, will alleviate the soul's ache. Others turn to sexual gratification. Jeremiah's reference to the one who "seeks his strength in flesh" suggests that some use sex and power as means to escape from the soul's angst. None of these work, of course, and one is eventually left feeling like "a salt and empty earth": empty, life-less and drained. For only God, who alone understands the human heart, can slake the soul's thirst. The psalmist perceived this essential truth when he said: "O God, you are my God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water" (Psalm 62:1-2).

Many of us may already know this, but nevertheless, we still repeatedly reach out for lesser goods, deluded into thinking that many of those will fill the God-shaped hole in our lives; but only living water, Goodness itself, can quench the thirsty, parched soul. At our Baptism, and again in Confirmation, Christ poured out his loving Spirit into our souls to quench and refresh us. Thus, we have been rooted in the living water of the Spirit who gives us strength to endure all things, as Lazarus did. When we feel restless and long for more, it is really more of God that we want and need: let us reach out, then, for the God who unfailingly desires us.

This Easter, many catechumens, having emerged from the barren desert of Lent and their lives, will be plunged into the waters of Baptism, and the rest of us will renew our baptismal vows. To prepare for that, let us recall how at our own Baptism we first placed our hope in God, becoming "like a tree planted beside the waters, that stretches out its roots to the stream". Let us return to God, place our trust in Him, and ask the Holy Spirit to fill our lives and "water that which is dry" in our lives, so that we may be fruitful and savour the sweetness of eternal life.

(From the English Dominicans) 


PRAYER
O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you:
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness,
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me...
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before me.
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised...Amen
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 - 1945)

Jesus - not one of the resurrected . . . the Resurrection itself! (von Balthasar)

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) a Swiss theologian and priest (who almost become a cardinal, but died before the ceremony) was a favourite theologian of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. He is considered to be one of the most important - and cultured - Christian thinkers of the 20th century. I have lifted this quote from Fr Aidan Kimel’s excellent blog HERE.

I am the resurrection and the life, but not as the world knows them: that decaying cycle of springs and autumns, that millstone of melancholy, that aping of eternal life. All the world’s living and dying, taken together, are one great death, and it is this death that I awaken to life. Once I entered the world, a new and unknown sap began to circulate in the veins and branches of nature. The powers of destiny, the might of the planets, the demons of the blood, the rulers of the air, the spirit of the earth, and whatever other dark things still cover in the secret folds of creation: all of this has now been subdued and is ordered about and must obey the higher law. All the world’s form is to me but matter that I inspirit. My action is not grafted from without to the old life, to the old pleasure-gardens of Pan; being the very life of life, I transform the marrow from within. All that dies becomes the property of my life. All that passes over in autumn runs ashore on my spring. All that turns to mold fertilizes my blossoms. All that denies has already been convicted; all that covets has already been dispossessed; all that stiffens has already been broken.

I am not one of the resurrected; I am the resurrection itself. Whoever lives in me, whoever is taken up into me, is taken up in resurrection. I am the transformation. As bread and wine are transformed, so the world is transformed into me. The grain of mustard is tiny, and yet its inner might does not rest until it overshadows all the world’s plants. Neither does my Resurrection rest until the grave of the last soul has burst, and my powers have reached even to the furthest-branch of creation. You see death; you feel the descent to the end. But death is itself a life, perhaps the most living life; it is the darkening depth of my life, and the end is itself the beginning, and the descent is itself the soaring up.

What can still be called death after I have died my death? Does not every dying from now on receive the meaning and seal of my death? Is its significance not that of a stretching out of the arms and a perfect sacrifice into the bosom of my Father? In death the barriers fall away; in death the ever-forbidden lock snaps open; the sluice bursts, the waters pour out freely. All the terrors that hover around death are morning mists that disperse into the blue. Even the slow death of souls when they bitterly shut themselves off from God—when they entrench and wall themselves up, when the world towers up around them like the pit of a grave, and all love becomes as the smell of mould, and hope withers, and a cold defiance rears its head and shows its tongue, a viper up from the depths: have I not suffered my way through all these deaths. And what can their poison do against the deadly antidote of my love? Every horror became for my love a garment in which to conceal itself, a wall through which to walk.

Do not be afraid of death. Death is the liberating flame of the sacrifice, and sacrifice is transformation. But Eucharistic transformation is communion in my eternal life. I am Life. Whoever believes in me, whoever eats and drinks me, has life in himself, eternal life, already here and now, and I will raise him up on the last day.

C.S. Lewis again . . . on love

If you've never read it, make sure you get C.S. Lewis' book, THE FOUR LOVES. It is available very cheaply HERE as an e-book. I share with you two of my favourite passages from it: 

“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.” 

* * * * * 

“Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering." 

"To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities."

"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 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.” 

Jesus “descended into the depths of the absence of God.” – Kallistos Ware

I have a handful of books for lending to those we call “serious seekers”. Some of these books are philosophical, some historical, and some brazenly evangelistic. Very often I have encouraged people to work their way through The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware (1979). Written from an Orthodox perspective, it tends to relate the Gospel and the Faith in a “holistic” way, speaking to the cry of the heart as much as to the enquiry of the mind. Over the next couple of days I will be sharing from Ware’s book some paragraphs on the meaning of the Lord's Passion. 

"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows" (Isaiah 53:4) - all our griefs, all our sorrows. "The unissued is unhealed": but Christ our healer has assumed into himself everything, even death. 

Death has both a physical and a spiritual aspect, and of the two it is the spiritual that is the more terrible. Physical death is the separation of man's body from his soul; spiritual death, the separation of man's soul from God. When we say that Christ became "obedient unto death" (Phil. 2.8), we are not to limit these words to physical death alone. We should not think only of the bodily sufferings which Christ endured at his Passion - the scourging, the stumbling beneath the weight of the Cross, the nails, the thirst and heat, the torment of hanging stretched on the wood. The true meaning of the Passion is found, not in this only, but much more in his spiritual sufferings - in his sense of failure, isolation and utter loneliness, in the pain of love offered but rejected. 

The Gospels are understandably reticent in speaking about his inward suffering, yet they provide us with certain glimpses. First, there is Christ's Agony in the garden of Gethsemane, when he is overwhelmed by horror and dismay, when he prays in anguish to his Father, "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me" (Matt. 26:39), and when his sweat falls to the ground "like great drops of blood" (Luke 22:44). Gethsemane, as Metropolitan Antony of Kiev insisted, provides the key to our whole doctrine of the Atonement. Christ is here confronted by a choice. Under no compulsion to die, freely he chooses to do so; and by this act of voluntary self-offering he turns what would have been a piece of arbitrary violence, a judicial murder, into a redemptive sacrifice. But this act of free choice is immensely difficult. Resolving to go forward to arrest and crucifixion, Jesus experiences, in the words of William Law, "the anguishing terrors of a lost soul...the reality of eternal death". Full weight must be given to Christ's words at Gethsemane. "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death" (Matt. 26:38). Jesus enters at this moment totally into the experience of spiritual death. He is at this moment identifying himself with all the despair and mental pain of humanity; and this identification is far more important to us than his participation in our physical pain.  

A second glimpse is given us at the Crucifixion, when Christ cries out with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?," (Matt. 27:46). Once again, full weight should be given to these words. Here is the extreme point of Christ's desolation when he feels abandoned not only by men but by God. We cannot begin to explain how it is possible for one who is himself the living God to lose awareness of the divine presence. But this at least is evident. In Christ's Passion there is no play-acting, nothing is done for outward show. Each word from the Cross means what it says. And if the cry "My God, my God..." is to signify anything at all, it must mean that at this moment Jesus is truly experiencing the spiritual death of separation from God. Not only does he shed his blood for us, but for our sakes he accepts even the loss of God. 

"He descended into hell" (Apostles' Creed). Does this mean merely that Christ went to preach to the departed spirits during the interval between Great Friday evening and Easter morning (see 1 Pet. 3:19)? Surely it has also a deeper sense. Hell is a point not in space but in the soul. It is the place where God is not. (And yet God is everywhere!) If Christ truly “descended into hell", that means he descended into the depths of the absence of God. Totally, unreservedly, he identifies himself with all man's anguish and alienation. He assumed it into himself, and by assuming it he healed it. There was no other way he could heal it, except by making it his own. 

Such is the message of the Cross to each one of us. However far I have to travel through the valley of the shadow of death, I am never alone. I have a companion. And this companion is not only a true man as I am, but also true God from true God. At the moment of Christ's deepest humiliation on the Cross, he is as much the eternal and living God as he is at his Transfiguration in glory upon Mount Tabor. Looking upon Christ crucified, I see not only a suffering man but suffering God.