According to CS LEWIS...
There is no safe investment. 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." —C. S. Lewis
It started with a wish on my birthday in 2012...
I was newly separated from my high-school sweetheart, having lost a 12 year marriage and a 20 year relationship. In the wake of total devastation - financial, medical, family, you name it - I desperately longed to know what it felt like to be LOVED...deeply LOVED...Little did I know that GOD had a much bigger idea of LOVE for me. Beyond my limited human idea of EROS, GOD was preparing to teach me of the kind of LOVE that unites all that is - kenotic LOVE pouring forth from the source of Being itself.
I still believe in LOVE...
Even after the suffering, pain, and broken moments seemed to leave me frozen in time, I crawled out of the darkness again and again with an innate drive to heal. Somehow, even though I didn't always believe that I deserved LOVE, especially from other humans, I knew that infinite LOVE burning beyond comprehension held me in its eternal grasp and I was safe...always.
More than a feeling or an emotion, LOVE extends beyond the limits of human Eros into the kenotic LOVE that pours life into existence. From mother birthing child to cataclysmic birthing of stars, LOVE is the unfathomable ground of Being that moves - even in stillness - toward the final perfect resolution.
LOVE feels like a soulful cry; a yearning; a rush of ecstasy; a comforting embrace; a painful burning away of the cartilage surrounding old wounds from the past. LOVE is not for the faint of heart - LOVE is courageous - LOVE brings me into alignment along a path that is tumultuous, scoured with the sandy granules that the Divine uses to shape me into my Calling. I am worthy of LOVE - Kenosis. Sharing the power of kenotic LOVE, especially in the midst of immense suffering, is my purpose. It is only through repeated journeys through the path of descent that I finally noticed grace and courage pouring forth from Divine LOVE.
This Divine Kenotic LOVE showed me how to LOVE before LOVING me into being. Life incarnate is therefore a process of nurturing and unfurling the blessing seed of LOVE planted at the spark of life so that humanity may fully manifest the body of Christ. Amen.