The gem

So back to Lewis.

At the very start of Freshman Orientation, we were each handed a copy of The Four Loves...or, more likely, we were required to buy it for the course. However it happened, the result was me, sprawled across my dorm bed the second night of college, devouring the book from start to finish.

To this day, I'm fairly certain that I'm the lone person in my freshman class who actually read the thing. Which is a minor travesty, because this is C.S. Lewis at his best.

I can't get past the introduction without ramming head-first into portions I just have to (have to) share with you.

"I was looking forward," Lewis explains,"to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love [Gift-love] and disparagements of the second [Need-love]. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true. I still think that if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state. But I would not now say (with my master, MacDonald) that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for love something that is not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and contradictions. The reality is more complicated than I supposed."

And this is what I like about Lewis; I mean, yes, he's remarkably brilliant, but he still talks with us as if he's a regular old chap just sifting out his thoughts as he shares them.

Further on in the introduction:

"Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man's love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing--for it ought to be growing--awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose."

And later:

"Thus one Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in man's highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense the least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?"

Yes, all this in the first four pages, before the meat of the book even begins.

But alas, I hear my sewing calling. So I suppose this shall have to be part two in a three-part series. Toodles for now.