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 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 to the risk of 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, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960), pp. 138-139; also quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon
Greetings.
This quote does very much resonate with me, to the point that I will go out today and see if the book is in the library. Thank you, Fr. Harmon, for posting it. I don’t suppose the sermon in which it was quoted is online anywhere? My google-fu is above average, but I cannot find it.
regards,
JPB
This is very timely. We had to put down a beloved pet last week.