Like blood from a wound

Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.

--Chitra Banerjee Divakuruni

The point of stories

From The Night is Far Spent:

The point of stories is enjoyment--even Oedipus and War and Peace. But stories do, in fact, echo our real-life situations. One way or another, everything does come down, in the end, to a very few issues: humility versus pride; peaceableness versus strife; generosity versus parsimony; fidelity versus perfidiousness; good cheer versus wrath; purity versus squalor in the inner man. And of course even that list can be boiled down to one contrast: love versus unlove. Heaven versus hell.

--Thomas Howard

Grant that I may not so much...

I've been thinking about how much easier it is to love, to give love, than to receive it.

St. Francis calls us to it in his prayer:

Grant that we may not so much seek to be loved, as to love.

It seems good advice all around.

Loving rather than being loved is not merely more of a gift, more of a self-donation. It is also less painful. By a long shot.

Perhaps that is why God -is- love. Perhaps that is how Yeshua stands the pain of rejection throughout eternity, and doesn't anhialate all the universes in a cataclysmic explosion of grief.

He loves. He is love. He seeks to love.

Grant me, Lord, that I may not so much seek to be loved, as to love.

Male and female, He created them

I have been thinking about women, and the love of women in particular.

There is a feminine character to love, and a masculine. I can't speak much about the latter given that it would be mere observation. But I am getting a deeper understanding of the feminine.

It amazes me that God always wants to show us more. To take us deeper. Just when you think you understand, He takes your hand and leads you further. It is breathtaking.

When women love, they want to give fully. They want to give all. They want total consummation, total gift, total consumption. They give heedlessly, recklessly, without counting the cost.

Our God, in His wisdom, knew this, and made us to be complementary. Male and female He created them, because the swooning giving of two women would be too abandoned. Too unmeasured. We need a masculine reserve to achieve balance.

The feminine gifts soften the masculine reserve. The masculine strengths protect the feminine vulnerability.

He is so wise...

To give and to receive

My BP has spoken of people who have a charism of love. In the past I have thought that this meant a capacity for giving love. And it does. But my beloved DiDi has shown me that it is much more. She has tremendous ability to give love, but also to receive it. She is all open arms and heart. I pray that I may also be both.

Intensity of love

The comment below from Ike was just so jam-packed with good stuff that I asked to add it as a post.

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In his biography of Jonathan Edwards, page 497, George Marsden writes, "In the Edwardses' world, the meaning of life was found in intense loves, including earthly loves." It was the tone of their life together. They understood that God is of such a nature, creation is for such a purpose, redemption is of such a power, that intensity of love is the meaning of it all. Intensity. Passion. Wholeheartedness.

Deuteronomy 6:5 makes intense love the greatest commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." Moderate love is a sin. Maybe the worst sin.

As Augustine said, "Give me a man in love. He knows what I mean."

Today for example

Some days I want to scream with love and rage.

Return to lovemaking

Over the weekend I promised to write more about lovemaking, so I return to it now.

In that post I said that love making within a marriage is unitive, drawing husband and wife together. Making the two become one. In a sense, it creates love between. It builds it up and strengthens it.

Because of that, lovemaking is not simply to be looked to for pleasure and as a right, but for the unification it provides. It is a responsibility and obligation of marriage. Like taking vitamins (which hopefully taste good).

At some points in marriage, it may even have an aspect of sacrifice. (But then, isn't the best lovemaking sacrificial rather than self seeking?)

We are all called to chaste living. Even within marriage, where chastity takes the form of control over our minds, and avoiding the lustful use of eachother.

But how to properly manage any season of misplaced passions which arise? If a man finds himself attracted to another woman, perhaps even very strongly, what is he to do with that energy?

It would clearly be wrong to use a spouse by pretending they are the coveted one. But would it be wrong if he were to channel that passion toward his wife, resisting the urge to fantasize?

I am drawn to the idea of lovemaking as an act of worship. If we view it that way, why shouldn't we be able to channel -all- of our passions into this ultimate act of giving to our Lord, even those which are not properly ordered?

Lovemaking

Been thinking about lovemaking.

Love -making-.

Generation of love through the act of love.

More soon.

Love seeks union

Love seeks union.

This is what I thought about as I luxuriated in bed this morning, surrounded by silence.

That, and it's correlary; unappeasable want.

Shakespeare on love (12)

From a Midsummer Night's Dream:

Love looks not with the eyes,
but with the mind,
and therefore is winged Cupid
painted blind.

The three become one

I recently sat in a small group celebrating the morning office, and listened to our voices united in praying the Lord's prayer.

My mind wandered where it wanders, and I wondered what it might be like to recite the prayer responsively while in the preliminary steps of lovemaking.

What would it be like to turn lovemaking into worship?

Would the three become one?

(Did I mention that I sometimes wonder about my mind?)

George MacDonald on Dying of Desire (II)

From Phantastes:

"He could not come near her, could not speak to her, could not hear a sound from those sweet lips, to which his longing eyes would cling like bees to their honey-founts. Ever and anon he sang to himself: "I shall die for love of the maiden;" and ever he looked again, and died not, though his heart seemed ready to break with intensity of life and longing. And the more he did for her, the more he loved her; and he hoped that, although she never appeared to see him, yet she was pleased to think that one unknown would give his life to her. He tried to comfort himself over his separation from her, by thinking that perhaps some day she would see him and make signs to him, and that would satisfy him; "for," thought he, "is not this all that a loving soul can do to enter into communion with another? Nay, how many who love never come nearer than to behold each other as in a mirror; seem to know and yet never know the inward life; never enter the other soul; and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which they have been hovering for years?"

Passionate encounter

This morning God talked to me about the kind of love affair he wants me to have with him. He wanted me to know that it should be passionate.

I thought whine-ily, in response:

"But I've never encountered you physically".

To which he replied:

"Oh, you haven't?"

Construction vs Creation

“The whole difference between a construction and a creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

--G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton on religion

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

From The Baptism of Imagination: A conversation with Peter Kreeft:

"Faith and hope and love all have a moreness to them. Faith means I trust you more than I can prove, hope means I hope for more than I can attain and grasp, and love means there is more in you than I can possibly love worthily."