But [Charity], though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well recognized that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with Charity precisely because they know that it will wound us...
We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.
-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 132-133.
1 comment:
This was a difficult passage to read. I want to be loved because I'm CUTE. To be loved despite the fact that I'm appallingly uncute is a bit of a letdown...
But true Charity will look beyond my uncuteness, and see Christ. To draw an elaborate metaphor...I hope that I can disguise my pigginess with a little lipstick (let's put some lipstick on this pig...). Charity looks beyond the lipstick as well as the pig, and sees someone created in the image of God and redeemed, not a pig at all...
So maybe I don't mind Charity.
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