I'm reading C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves. This book is ridiculous. In the midst of the confusion of our world. The friendships, relationships, familial ties that bind us all, confuse us all, and at times leave us wondering - well, me at least - were laid out in the daylight for me in this book.
Lewis classifies different parts of love as Need-love and Gift-love (aka Appreciative-love). Then he lays out the four different types of love he has seen in life. I was a little bit skeptical as to whether it would be correct and comprehensive - there are so many emotions that run through us humans.
But, not including a few real-life scenarios Lewis uses that I haven't encountered, I think he hit the nail on the head. There is Affection, the love you show for people who are placed in your life through circumstances (family, co-workers etc.) There is Friendship, the most unnatural (though more closely divine) of the loves because you chose it and it is not biologically natural and necessary for life. There is Eros, romantic love that overtakes and binds two people together in appreciation simply for who that person is. Each of these loves deserves a book all its own. It's overwhelming. There is also a chapter on Charity love...which I haven't read yet, so we'll save that for another day.
Throughout, one thing is evident to me - love is so easily twisted from divine to demonic. All these loves make up the love God IS. We see only a shadow of His loving reality. But we also twist that shadowy love - into something unholy, something gross.
"The natural loves are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first vaguely described as "decency and common sense," but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet."
Love in and of itself, in our dark world, will easily be twisted into something not of God. It becomes a perversion with our constant care - without our eyes set on the Author of love itself.
"To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own awns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined."
Yet, our personal efforts to learn how to love better pale in comparison. All my personal actions and efforts to live "morally" are dust without the light of the one Love, the God who is himself Love. When He loves me, I know more what it means to love well and rightly.
"When God planted a garden, He set a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to "dress" them...and unless His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall largely use this tool to little purpose...While we hack and prune we know very well that what we are hacking and pruning is big with a splendor and vitality which our rational will could never of itself have supplied. To liberate that splendor, to let it become fully what it is trying to be, to have tall trees instead of tangles, and sweet apples instead of crabs, is part of our purpose."
So I can't just live however I feel, influenced by the tainted shadow of love I know. I must play by the rules of the One who made love, spending my time pruning my human love to allow it to shine like His love - freeing it to sprout and grow and bring forth fruit like He intended.
In short, love itself is not self-sustaining. It quickly becomes gross. Yet, it IS beautiful and important. Love shouldn't be shunned in fear. It is worthy of our acceptance - of love's emotions and stirrings in our hearts - as long as we have our eyes set on Love itself, the God who is love. Embrace the love we feel, but also watch it, polish it, safeguard it from distortion, set it out in the light to gleam.
It's Christmas eve, and that means if I write something tonight it should tie into the holiday.
"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son."
Thank you, Heavenly Father. Amen.
