to love is to be vulnerable

i go to a class almost every wednesday night called education for ministry, efm for short. i think it should be called education for life instead of ministry. it is a rather hard class to explain because any explanation minimizes what we actually do in class.

we sit around an octagonal table and listen to each other. we listen to our hopes, fears, laugh at each other, sing songs, sit in silence and recognize the divinity in each of us. it is one of the most life giving groups i have ever been a part of.

we talk about war, devastation, redemption, hope, love, jesus, economic crisis, marriage, divorce, relationships, gandhi, civil rights, our jobs, our callings, bob marley and just about anything else you can think of. it is challenging and thought provoking and calls me into my own divinity.

it makes me accountable to my own divinity.

yesterday we got into a discussion about what it really means to love and to be loved. in some of the reading we did there was the following quote from C.S. Lewis. i am amazed at the clarity and truth of this quote.

"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 an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in a 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."

stepping outside the certain stigmas and confines that words like damnation, love, heaven, and hell hold, i would say this statement rings true of what happens when we are paralyzed by the fear of being broken- being separated from that which brings wholeness.

brokenness bringing wholeness. now there is a thought.