Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Valentine thoughts on true love & true self

Inexorable Love

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy... For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected – not in itself, but in the object.... Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

Love consumes the false self and releases the true

When we say that God is Love, do we teach people that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more.... The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear.

[And this is Love.]

Love that compels us in dryness


That person is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

Selah.

George MacDonald: An Anthology, by C.S. Lewis.

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