The Vulnerability of Love (C.S. Lewis)

This thought may seem a bit strange for Christmas Eve, but in the season of love and charity, I found it appropriate:

"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 to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that 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 Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

"I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness . . . Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become . . . more and more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it." -C.S. Lewis

The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument

Welcome to the world, little Finn Fedor!! (Dec. 16, 2008)

The spirit is too blunt an instrument

to have made this baby.

Nothing so unskilful as human passions

could have managed the intricate

exacting particulars: the tiny

blind bones with their manipulating tendons,

the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient

fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae

in the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent

fingernails, the shell-like complexity

of the ear with its firm involutions

concentric in miniature to the minute

ossicles. Imagine the

infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections

of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments

through which the completed body

already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment

possessed of the simplest accuracy.

No. No desire or affection could have done

with practice what habit

has done perfectly, indifferently,

through the body's ignorant precision.

It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent

love and despair and anxiety

and their pain.

-Anne Stevenson

A Hundred Silences

"A Hundred Silences"
By Gabeba Baderoon

Light is receding like heat from the day.
Under his hands, the ground feels warmer than the air.
He has been in the small garden since returning
from work, weeding. It is a word for being alone.

He loosens the grip of the soil with a trowel,
tugs then eases out the plants
with their threading roots.
Time lengthens, enters the ground.
The sun sinks
behind the garage early in the afternoon.
Shadows narrow and slide against the grass,
up the wall, soft and anonymous.

Geese fly overhead towards the mountain,
the downward beat of their wings marking
the place where the distance ends,
like a sheet touching skin.

The weeds become shape and grain in the dusk.
Any moment a voice will call through the window.
He will not finish this today. He rises
and walks to the garage to store the trowel.

Across the wall, hundreds of birds
come to settle in the neighbor's plum tree,
twitting and jabbing and rustling
then, on a breath, quiet.

He hears a hundred silences fall,
break and fall again.