When Augustine was a young man, a friend he loved died, and he wrote afterward that he had become a question to himself. Everything he looked at reminded him of the one who was missing. He had poured his soul out on the sand, he said, by loving a man who could die as though he never would. He came to understand that the problem was not loving someone mortal, but making something mortal the foundation of his happiness. Love people, but let the heart rest in what cannot be lost.
Nearly sixteen centuries later C. S. Lewis read Augustine and found something to challenge:
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 Four Loves)
At a crossroads at seventeen, I made this passage my mantra and recited it for a decade, until I felt the heart of it live in my bones. I have lived every word of it, and I have never regretted it.
Yet perhaps Lewis was challenging Augustine’s words more than his meaning. For Augustine had not rejected human love; he had warned against asking it to bear the weight of God. And Lewis himself, a few pages on, writes that it is probably impossible to love any human being simply “too much.” We may love someone too much in proportion to how little we love God, but the fault is in the smallness of the one love and never in the size of the other.
Lewis is writing to people who are tempted to stop loving so they can stop hurting. Perhaps his hardest cases are the ones who never could.
There is a body of research on people who grew up without secure attachments and developed security later in life. The researchers call it earned security. A child who had no safe place can still grow into an adult who provides one. Among the things that seem to matter are finding love somewhere, from a grandparent, a neighbor, a teacher, a friend’s mother, enough of it to learn the shape of the thing. And learning to build a true story about her own life, one that neither excuses what happened nor is swallowed by it.
I did not know any of that while I was living it. I only know that the love I could not stop is the reason I had anything to work with. Lewis says the locked heart becomes unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Mine was never locked, and so it was broken, over and over, and it never once turned to stone.
The same love that cost me the most is the love that let me build a healthy story of my life and keep a humane view of people, against every odd. I have stopped trying to separate the wound from the rescue. I am not sure they were ever separate.
Perhaps Augustine and Lewis were closer than they’re usually read. Augustine questioned where the heart should rest; Lewis insisted that it must remain open.
I think we get it backwards. We trust people and love God, when it should be the other way around. We hand the people closest to us a weight they were never built to carry, our safety, our sense of what is real, and when they drop it we conclude that the problem was loving them. Then we give God the measured thing, the Sunday thing, love as a duty kept at a respectful distance. If Lewis is right that the hurt does not come from loving people too much, then maybe it comes from asking them to stand where only God can stand.
Early in John’s gospel, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Passover, and many people believe in him because of the signs he is doing. Then John adds a line that is easy to read past: “But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people” (John 2:24). He did not stop loving Jerusalem. Later, approaching the city for the last time, “he wept over it” (Luke 19:41). But he never made those people the ground he stood on. And in Nazareth, where he had grown up, when the crowd in the synagogue turned on him and tried to throw him from a cliff, he did not stay to prove anything. “He walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (Luke 4:30). Loving someone has never required trusting them, and taking your trust back from someone who has betrayed it is not a failure of love.
I am still learning to live it. The child I was did not love wrongly; she trusted the only person she had, which is what children do. And for years I placed my safety in hands that kept dropping it, and I kept handing it back, because I did not yet know there was anywhere else to put it. I know now that there is.
I love with my eyes open, because love does not require me to pretend. I love with my hands open, because love was never meant to be withheld.
With my children I have it right. I gather them the way the hen in the gospel gathers her chicks, close under the wing, and I love them with everything I have and ask them to carry none of it. That is the one place in my life where the love and the trust are in the right order.
Research: Roisman, Padrón, Sroufe & Egeland (2002), Child Development; Saunders, Jacobvitz, Zaccagnino, Beverung & Hazen (2011), Attachment & Human Development.
