Full-Fat Life

“There is no safe investment. 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 an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of 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… 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 armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.”
— C.S. Lewis The Four Loves

The above quotation is something I've carried with me in my heart ever since I first read it years ago. I could explain what I believe about how to live life for hours and still not get any closer to this (or any more elegant) than this.

I've just been writing a letter to a dear friend and shared this quotation with him. I've been thinking about living and love and relationships a lot, particularly in the last 24 hours. (Yes, even more so than usual, if that's possible.) So I thought I'd post it here because… well, really because I felt like it.