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 of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” CS Lewis, The Four Loves, 1960
I was counselling a gal recently who worked at a well-known church and carried herself as a well-confidenced single girl. We were brainstorming about what she could do this particular evening to practice “enjoying God’s presence,” and I nonchalantly suggested a walk on the beach.
“That’d be nice, but the thought of people seeing me out there is too much to bear.
“What do you mean? Cause you’d start skipping, or something…or singing Jesus Loves Me?”
“No,” she chuckled. Just being by myself. I’m not good at that, and especially not good at letting people see me like that.”
“What about a movie, and then by the time it’s done it’ll be dark outside?”
“Yeah, but same thing…what would I do if someone saw me at the movies…by myself!?”
We’re petrified of being alone. We avoid situations and resist it at all costs. We reconvene with ex’s or return to abusers because being with someone feels better than being alone. When asked in an interview if she’s scared of death, well-known French singer, Edith Piaf answered “Not as afraid as I am of solitude.” Sometimes I wonder if Jesus ever felt his aloneness, or loneliness? I wonder how he found strength and courage and purity in his singleness, and in his last days on earth, feeling the unfelt presence and abandonment of God?
The thing with being alone is that when you enter its presence, you realize there aren’t a lot of answers. There aren’t ways to fix your plight, or safeguard your horizon. You are you, standing in the face of you, and there is nowhere to turn. You can lessen its weight, or distract its weighty implications, but once felt, the raw face of your self will never leave you alone. If you desire comfort and ease and the romantic highs of an illusion, never let yourself be truly alone. But if you desire the truth of yourself, and truthful state your soul, wholly embracing the reality of who you are and who you are not, seek solitude and wait for holy union.
continue reading
Chris Rogers encounters many young girls on the streets of Brazil
