Tuesday, February 14, 2006
So it's Valentine's Day today.
Excuse me while I wallow in sadness, loneliness and self pity.
On the other hand, I'm rather glad that I do not have to spend half my NS allowance buying gift and going on a date with my partner.
I'm positively tired of running around chasing this elusive dream of Love. I shall henceforth endeavor to focus my energy on more important things.
"For the pagan world runs after all such (earthly) things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well." Luke 12:30-31
Taking a page our of C.S. Lewis, from The Four Loves:
"There is no escape along the lines St Augustine suggests ('This is what comes,' he says, 'of giving one's heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.' -St Augustine, Confessions IV, 10). Nor along any other lines. 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 a 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 danges and perturbations of love is Hell."
And furthur into the chapter:
"God is love. Again, ;Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us' (1 John 4:10). We must not begin with mysticism, with the creature's love for God, or with the wonderful foretastes of the fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly life. We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only call a 'managerial' God; a Being whose function or nature is to 'run' the universe, who stands to it as a headmaster to a school or a hotelier to a hotel. But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, at home in 'the land of the Trinity', he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. 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 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."
{/9:39 AM}
me
