Posts tagged light
what is the "givenness" of your life?
a givenness to the check engine light
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
The check engine light.
“What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us.
It helps to make us generous and courageous. it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust.
No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’.
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.
There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last.
If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were.
Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?
But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.
Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling.
It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.
They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else.
‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
…the combustion chamber.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the check engine light.
a givenness to not drink the light that is in the water
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Not drink the light that is in the water.
“You flowers and trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks, and wild birds, you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you.
The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depth of my will tries to swing my deepest self away from God and direct it to your love.
I try to touch you with the deep fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary, and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.
But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and are mirrors of His beauty.
He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water: but if I try to drink the light that is in the water, I only shatter the reflection.
And so I live alone and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things, knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to one of them or all of them.
The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart.
It is an unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it. It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven, where all things will belong to us in their highest causes.” Thomas Merton, Journal II, September 14, 368-69
…surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not drink the light that is in the water.
a givenness to what’s right of the light
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
What’s right of the light.
“The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.”
George MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance
The delusion of the darkness.
…only the light knows itself and the darkness also.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to what’s right of the light.
