I first started this book several months ago, but, getting distracted by something else, wasn't able to finish it. When I picked it up again, I had to start at the beginning again--if you've read anything of Lewis' you know what I'm talking about. However, this time, I was able to grasp what he was communicating in a more full way.
For love, as Lewis explains, is a "Gift-Love" and a "Need-Love". The gift-love is a kind of love which must give in order to be love. It is like a father working for his family, giving of himself, in order to provide for them. The need-love is love which needs. It is need-love that drives a child to a mother's arms or a friend to friend conversation. Humans can and do express these loves, both gift and need, but only in a limited fashion. God alone is perfect love. He ultimately gives of Himself, by Jesus Christ, in the gift of salvation and sustaining grace on the universe He created. And He created us to need Him for life, breath, and every move we make.
Affection
It is described as the "humblest" of all the loves. It focuses on something or someone familiar, and perhaps, it's greatest enemy is change.
"Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble un-dress, private things soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing machine a gollywog (child's doll) left on the lawn." (Lewis, 34)
"There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire." (Lewis, 35)
Friendship
It is called the most uncommon and unnatural of the loves. It is the love between persons who have something in common, who are functioning at their highest level of "individuality". They are not looking at each other, as Affection or Eros might do, but side by side, they are focused on an object or subject of common interest. They are always talking, though never about the "friendship".
"Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I though I was the only one.'...It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision--it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude." (Lewis 65)
Eros
It is the love of "being in love". This is both a gift and need love, and the lines of which are blurred out of necessity. It is seen in the relationship between a husband and wife, a deep desire for one another in fullness.
"Very often [being in love] what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved--a general, unspecific pre-occupation with her in her totality...If you were to ask him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, 'To go on thinking of her.' He is love's contemplative." (Lewis, 93)
Charity
It is the love of God; God is love. This is love of and from God, demonstrated in creation, in Jesus Christ by His sacrifice for sins, in the gift of salvation, and in the fullness of His plan for restoration and redemption of the created world. God's love is "poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given to us." (Romans 5) And in this love we are to love God and one another.
"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." (Lewis 120)
"Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness...We may love him (others) too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy." (Lewis 122)
"In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give...God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them...This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves." (Lewis 127)
"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.
Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.
And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure."
~ 1 John 3:1-3
No comments:
Post a Comment