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 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.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, p. 121:
Mr. Jones quoted David Augsburger this year at the Christ Church Ministerial Conference:
“My favorite definition of agape, compiled from many sources, is: a radical commitment to the welfare of the other that sees the other with an equal regard in spite of the other’s response; that seeks to be understanding without need to understand or to be understood; that risks, cares, gives, and shares with no need for reciprocity, no need to be respected, no need to be appreciated, no need to be thanked, and no need to enjoy the process.”
I’m not a violent man.
I want to punch the entire production team of the new Brideshead Revisited in the throat. And I haven’t even seen it yet. Thomas Hibbs at First Things has one of the more interesting reviews of the flick. Hibbs is a more temperate man than I.
