March 14, 2018 - Wednesday Evening Service Lent 4 - Prayer Around the Cross

Pastor Ray invited us to come forward and pray with our hearts in whatever state they were in at that moment.

I wasn't experiencing worship as usual. I was tired and not meaningfully connecting with the prayers, music or others around me. I felt nothing.

Pastor Ray read a quote by C.S. Lewis, the same one he read two weeks ago Wednesday:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable.

I thought there must be something more to the context around this quote. I remembered reading Lewis' Four Loves and, in the back of my mind, there was something about not dismissing something he called need-love as selfish but I couldn't remember more. There was nothing in me the moment when I heard the quote, certainly not love and a vulnerable heart.

If I wanted to choose love and be vulnerable I would do better at home. That felt like a form of selfishness at that moment. I looked at the cross I have seen so often in other worship experiences with new eyes. I saw it objectively with the same regard I had looking at the chair next to me. The quote seemed cruel predicting that if you could choose not to give your love to anything but hobbies and little luxuries that your heart would be irredeemable. No new life was not the message I individually needed last night.

There is a certainty expressed in this Lewis quote together with a deep satisfaction. I don't know if we can chose or live permanently in any one state, like a vulnerable or invulnerable heart, any more than we can stay in a beautiful moment where God's presence is real.

This may be what the quote is intended to evoke in us. To inspire vulnerability in any heart that encounters it towards someone who has not "given their heart". Yet that only came to me on this reflection as I revisited this Wednesday experience.

Puzzling.