Over the past week or so, since the Boston Marathon Bombing and the West, Texas explosion, I have heard people respond and seek to put into perspective their pain, shock, anger, and a host of other emotions. Many are looking for words to explain and finding that words are lacking in their ability to scratch the surface of deep emotion. The two most common responses involve some form of reacting in anger or withdrawing from a world that can be so painful.
The great author and Christian, C. S. Lewis of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe fame, writes in The Four Loves, “In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions, IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. 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.
Of course this is excellent sense. . . Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering!’
To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. . .
There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. 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 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
In John 15:13-15, we read, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends . . . I do not call you servants any longer . . . but I have called you friends. . .” Here we learn one of the timeless truths so often rediscovered in Scripture. If you want to have a friend, you must be a friend. Being a friend means taking a risk, being vulnerable. One of the greatest hopes for our world (where so few know their neighbors, seldom talk to family, spend all their free time in personal endeavors, and seldom reach out to those in need) is relearning that your life, your involvement really can make a difference!
If you want to see the power and joy of vulnerability, of friendship do something different. Volunteer at your church, assist a civic organization, or spend time with an organization that helps the homeless or the needy. Will the effort be uncomfortable or a little difficult? Hopefully! But the effort will open our “casket of selfishness,” sent our hearts free, and let us experience the power of love. Giving yourself to another, there is no greater expression or experience of love. As we face the difficulties we have recently experienced as a nation, to withdraw or lash out, will destroy us. Our only hope for justice, for building new life, for recreating our society, is found in practicing powerful, practical love. Such love overcomes and, by God's grace, lifts us above. Those who have lost, those closest to the pain of the events deserve such a response.
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