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
Thanks, Kendall. Your deep love for Lewis and his amazing gifts as an apologist and Christian writer is well known to us on this blog. But I venture a comment here that I’ve made before on other threads devoted to C. S. Lewis. To me, one of the greatest things about Lewis is the way he epitomizes supremely a truth that I’ve come to believe in ardently. I like to put it this way:
[b]God gave us both a right brain and a left brain. I think he intends us to use them both.[/b]
No one illustrates that better than C. S. Lewis, who could write superb fiction and non-fiction alike. That is a very rare accomplishment. Personally, I like his fiction works even more than his apologetic non-fiction, although I earnestly admire the latter too. But the point is that Lewis displays a highly developed right brain as well as left brain. He could do it all. And in that way he demonstrates something essential about Anglicanism at its best. That is, that we strive to hold together Word and Sacrament, and being both Protestant and Catholic. Not seeing those things as a case of Either/Or, but as a case of Both/And. No one has exemplified that rich balance and creative synthesis better than Lewis did.
David Handy+
Well said #1. Lewis epitomizes what has been the historic strength of Anglicanism’s path to Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord.
Randy Hoover-Dempsey+
Thanks Randy (#2).
Such kind words are always appreciated.
David Handy+