All for life-giving, life-taking love

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 —safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to 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

Lewis's experience of love, vulnerability and heart-pain was profound and searing. He was a wounded man. He lost his childhood faith after losing his mother when he was nine, his best friend in WW1, then his father, and finally his wife. Through the balm of the love of friends, he found his faith again and learned to grasp the connection between his creaturely vulnerability and the vulnerability of the omnipotent Creator who, in the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered fully into human vulnerability, even submitting to degradation and death - for love. Just for love.

Without love, without its vulnerability, life has no meaning. Without love, I am a tinkling cymbal, walking around and making a little noise but barely human: as Lewis says, 'unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable'.

Life springs from love. Love is life-giving, in every sense. But it is life-taking, too – it requires no less than everything.

If you do not love enough, you are not truly alive. If you do love enough, you will be killed. - Herbert McCabe OP

Perhaps not physically killed like the Son of God, but if I love enough the price of love may indeed feel like a sort of death.

To love is to become open, vulnerable. Without self-gift to the other and the embracing of my vulnerability, if I am not prepared to accept pain as the price to be paid, it is not love. It is something, but it is not love.

Lord, teach me to love others as you have loved me. Take out of my flesh this heart of stone and give me a new heart of flesh. (cf. Ezekiel 36:26)

A longer version of this post is here.