The Path of Peril and Promise 2/14/2021

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

I am making what I feel like is a pretty safe guess in thinking that if you are reading this that you are at least moderately familiar with the English language.  And being knowledgeable of the common tongue you know it is an utterly ridiculous language.  There are of course the countless volumes of asinine rules and all their exceptions that make about as much sense as a screen bottomed boat but then there are vast amounts of places where there is so much lack with words that are unbelievably inept at, well, doing their job. I suppose a word is meant to give some sort of form to an idea or thing. Other languages have the decency to grasp that some concepts carry so much magnitude that they may in fact need more than one word to disperse the weight. Nowhere is this inadequacy more glaring than the English word love. I know Greek has at least three, maybe four words for love and all its variations and depths. However, I am not writing this to whine about the flaws of the English language, mainly because I’m not trying to make this a multi-volume blog but I digress.  I apologize for the fact that all you have just read was a tangent. It was a somewhat on topic tangent but still. Anyway, with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day I wanted to talk a little about love; what it is and isn’t and lots of the in-betweens that most assuredly cannot be condensed into four little insufficient letters.

I am going to do something now that shouldn’t surprise you if you read my blog.  I am going to use a quote by my literary beloved, C.S. Lewis.  He will say with the epitome of beauty of thought and skill of language what I hope to write about today and I think his thought will help give me a frame for my own.  It will be a gloriously magnificent frame for what will likely be a rather abstract and eye-squinting painting, but again I digress. Lewis writes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable.”

In reading that quote, which I have done more times than I can count, it expresses to me that love really is a rather delicious poison.  If we choose to travel the path of loving absolutely anything there is risk involved.  I know that most of you, if not all of you already know this.  To love is to travel a very treacherous path. That sounds so negative but I don’t mean it to be. You know as well as I do that no matter how perfect your loved one may be (and we all know that’s a stretching adjective) if they have no other defect  (more stretching) then they are at the very least mortal.  It’s a sobering thought but true. Neither lover, nor family, nor friend nor pet can promise to live forever so despite themselves they will eventually hurt you.  No matter how well loved we are the nature of imperfect people makes them bound to disappoint us at best. And pets, well, bless them, they may love us better than people, but the disappointments remain. Just ask any carpet that wishes to remain unsoiled or trash can that longs to remain upright and unexplored.

Though loving is guaranteed to give you results of disappointment at best and pain at worst the positives are so worthwhile that it seems every single one of us is ready to take that chance. It would seem we have all chosen risk over regret.  I suppose the old saying losing love is better than having never loved is very true.  Honestly, if we just chose a life of avoidance to any real attachments, I would say Lewis is very accurate in describing the monstrosity that we would become.  Our whole lives are focused on the pursuit of love so if it was something we decided to ignore and evade then our lives are not very much lives at all but tombs filled with unfeeling trivialities.  While the pitfalls of love are dangerous at least it is living. It is living to the utmost embracing some of the most hazardously glorious experiences the human soul can know.  To attempt an existence without it would garner a survival that is something akin to the Dead Sea. It may appear pristine on the outside but within it is stark and lifeless.

I think our lifelong search for love despite its precarious balance of danger and joy is really and truly a search for permanence.   We want to find that one heart that will never leave us or hurt us.  Of course, as long as we are striving to find such things in people or animals we are setting ourselves up for failure.  If an unchanging and everlasting love is what we seek we really only have one option.  It makes sense that the one Source that would be able to fill the hole within our deepest selves would not only be the One that invented our deepest selves but also happens to perfectly fit the space that we can’t seem to find anything else to appropriately occupy.  All our dabblings in life with affection and relationships even in their most magnificent forms are only shadows of what that One Source can offer.  After all, He invented all those aspects of you; the way you want to be loved and the way you prefer to love and the type of love that will mean the most to you. 

So, on this day that is set aside to celebrate love in all our ways that will likely be vastly inadequate to show what we truly feel, for the love (see what I did there) of all that is good and holy, don’t rely on people, creatures or things to satisfy that longing. I do not reference just any longing, but I mean that exceptionally buried and profound desire that goes beyond the bond of a lover or the attachment of a pet.  By all means, celebrate those special hearts that connect with yours but that deeper still hunger does have something with which it can be satisfied.  It was made that way.  You were designed and engineered that way.  Seek the One who created the hole in the shape of Himself. He wants to be loved and since He loves back perfectly it seems to me that going after Him and what we’ve always longed for would be a treasure hunt worth every single up and down of the journey.