A SCAR

For a moment, I didn't belong in time.
With eyes shut, I lifted my face, letting my skin drink in the warm light. The sun face was slowly being tugged behind the two peaked mountain, as if to sleep, like a gleaming coin tucked in a leather pocket. I sat under the shadowless, deep breathes: seeing again, thankful again.
Three voices joined into song:

the first, surrounding me from overhead, beneath the brush of skeleton branches, birds. The second, farther, a gentle trickling; the ceaseless icy mountain flow from the fountain. the third, still farther, the river's timid climb from the heights, cradled by the rocks.
I read something there in the final pages of 'The Four Loves.' Something simple, something I had known before: that God loves, not because I am lovable, but because He is Love. Love is not that I -- human creature -- loved God, but that He Loved me: us.

"In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give."

Love is a gift, a gift given and the act of giving. And in the giving, receiving. Love, in the God-sense, is inhumane, Divine. How can a mere man love his enemies, his superiors, morons, the sulky and sneering? -- frankly, it's impossible, unless God enables him to. Love does not exist outside of God and that love is a grace.  
With winter's shattering beneath the fist of spring, the three songs, my naked feet (at last!), His generous light framing the crest of the mountain: I understood. I understood how He could be Love. Sadly, I've already forgotten my fistful-grasp and now merely remember it. The memory is a scar, though a beautiful scar.

In the final pages: "There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart 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. 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 the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

Learning to love,
Moriah