Reflections on Love....

"What the Grace gives is the full recognition, the sensible awareness, the complete acceptance --even, with certain reservations, the glad acceptance--of this Need[-Love of God]."

"Grace subsitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence."

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"We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times--and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit--they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them."

"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."

~C.S. Lewis

Fine Weavings

The Plan of the Master Weaver

Our lives are but fine weavings

That God and we prepare,

Each life becomes a fabric planned

And fashioned in His care.

We may not always see just how

The weavings intertwine,

But we must trust the Master's hand

And follow his design.

For He can view the pattern

Upon the upper side,

While we must look from underneath

And trust in Him to guide....

Sometimes a strand of sorrow

Is added to His plan,

And though it's difficult for us,

We still must understand

That it's He who fills the shuttle,

It's He who knows what's best,

So we must weave in patience

And leave to Him the rest....

Not til the loom is silent

And the shuttle ceases to fly

Shall God unroll the canvas

And explain the reason why--

The dark threads are as needed

in the Weaver's skillful hand

As the threads of gold and silver

In the pattern He has planned.

Paradox of Love

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, no 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 safe place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man." Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

~C. S. Lewis

It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game.

~C.S. Lewis

After Apple Picking

"After Apple Picking"

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Towards heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

~ Robert Frost ~

'To Autumn'

"To Autumn"

Seasons of mist and fellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

~John Keats~