Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Love:
- Agape
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain: "It is hardly
complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell. Yet even this he
accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be
shattered. And by trouble, or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of [punishment], God
shatters it, unmindful of his glory's diminution. I call this 'divine humility,' because it's a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is
going down under us, a poor thing to come to him as a last resort, to offer up our own
when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud, he would hardly
have us on such terms. But he is not proud. He stoops to conquer. He would have us even
though we have shown that we prefer everything else to him, and come to him because there
is nothing better now to be had."
- St.
Augustine: "Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart has no rest till
it comes to Thee."
- C.S.
Lewis, The Four Loves: "We may
hope that the resurrection of the body means also the resurrection of ... the general
fabric of our earthly life with its affections and relationships. But only on a
condition... nothing can enter [the spiritual realm] which cannot become heavenly. 'Flesh
and blood,' mere nature, cannot inherit that Kingdom. Man can ascend to Heaven only
because the Christ ... is 'formed in him.' Must we not suppose that the same is true of a
man's love's? Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love
Himself. And these can be raised with Him only if they have, in some degree and
fashion, shared His death; if the natural element in them has submitted -- year after
year, or in some sudden agony -- to transmutation. the fashion of the world passes away.
Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be
taken into the eternity of Charity...
- "Theologians have sometimes asked whether we shall 'know one another' in
Heaven, and whether the particular love-relations worked out on earth would then
continue to have any significance. It seems reasonable to reply: 'It may depend what kind
of love it had become, or was becoming, on earth.' For, surely, to meet in the eternal
world someone for whom your love in this, however strong, had been merely natural, would
not be (on that ground) even interesting. Would it not be like meeting in adult life
someone who had seemed to be a great friend at your preparatory school solely because of
common interests and occupations? If there was nothing more, if he was not a
kindred soul, he will now be a total stranger. Neither of you now plays
conkers... In Heaven I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be
equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is
eternally out of date... "We were made for God. Only
by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty,
loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It
is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were
loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to
a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it.
He has been party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our
earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth,
far more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and
no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned
already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the
creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find
them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.
-
- "But all that is far away in 'the land of the Trinity,' not
here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation. The very
purpose of the bereavement ... may have been to force this upon us. We are then compelled
to try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved."
- Thorton
Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a
land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the
only meaning."
- Viktor
Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning: Recounting an
Auschwitz experience: "We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and
through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying
guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very
sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind
did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next
to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better
off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."
"That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on
for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one
another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his
wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of
the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my
wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her
smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than
the sun which was beginning to rise.
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it
is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The
truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I
grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human
thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only
for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter
desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only
achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in
such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his
beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to
understand the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite
glory.'
"In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard
rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few
minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another
world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she
questioned me in return, and I answered...
"My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't
even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison
life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter.
There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts
of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have
given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that
my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. 'Set
me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.'"
- John
Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: "Perchance hee
for whom the Bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knowes not it tolls for him; And
perchance I may thinke my selfe so much better than I am, as that they they who are about
mee, and see my state, may have been caused it to toll for mee, and I know not that. The
Church is Catholike, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does, belongs to
all. When she baptized a child, that action concerns mee; for that child is thereby
connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed into that body, whereof I am a
member. And when she buries a Man, that action concerns me: All mankinde is of one
Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke,
but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must so be translated;
God emploies several translaters; some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse,
some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall
binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie
open to one another: As therefore the Bell that rings to a Sermon, calls not upon the
Preacher onely, but upon the Congregation to come; so this Bell calls us all: but how much
more mee, who am brought so neere the doore by this sicknesse. There was a contention as
farre as a suite, (in which both pietie and dignitie, religion, and estimation, were
mingled) which of the religious Orders should ring to praiers first in the Morning; and it
was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright
the dignitie of this Bell that tolls for our evening prayer, wee would bee glad to make it
ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might bee ours, as wel as his, whose
indeed it is. the Bell doth toll for him that thinkes it doth; and though
it intermit againe, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, hee is
united to God. Who casts not up his Eye to the Sunne when it rises? but who takes off his
eye from a Comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his eare to any bell, which upon any
occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a peece or himselfe
out of this world? No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of
the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the
lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
- Kierkegaard:
"To love another person is to help them love God."
- Henri
Nouwen: "Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched
and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to
keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time
you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your
body home and moving toward integration and unity."
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