“There is no safe investment. 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 to keep 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, inpenetrable, 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
“To love is to suffer in a fallen world.”
-Philip Carlson, You Were Made for Love
“Pain, or at least the willingness to risk pain, alone gives dignity to human love, and it is the price of its creative power. Without this, it is mere emotional enjoyment. It costs much to love any human being to the bitter end; and on every plane a total generosity, a love that includes pain and embraces it, is the price of all genuine accomplishment.”
-Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed
“I’m beginning to see through different eyes
To look into the face of the One who paid the price.
And I can enter into the fellowship of His suffering
In the way I love.”
In the way I love.”
-Jennie Joy, from the song “Different Eyes”
