“We love because he first loved us.”
“Lord, I would like to begin my day a jolly beggar, I would like to finish it that way as well.”
Certainly the day after Thanksgiving is one of the most delightful of the year. Shannan and I were reveling in the afterglow of family time, of kisses and hugs from kids and grands who, having traveled over the river and through the woods to our Pennsylvania home, were on the return. Black Friday shoppers were out in record number, but in our home quiet reigned.
It was the perfect day and the perfect time to continue my quest of writing a review of every book I have read this year (forty-one down, a few more to go). I was working my way through The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. Lewis devotes 180 pages to that elastic word, helping us clarify “love of pizza” and “love of wife” by differentiating four kinds of love:
Affection: The humblest love.
Friendship: The least jealous of loves.
Eros: The passionate love.
Charity: The love of God.
Lewis wants us to grasp the necessity of charity, that every kind of love and every act of love hinges on God’s love for us. He writes, "the loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without God's help.”
Yes, but . . .
We get that conceptually and even theologically, but as Lewis notes, there is something inside us that wants “to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness.” “No sooner do we believe that God loves us than than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.”
We are not!
Lewis points out we are not the sun, we are simply mirrors reflecting its rays. He writes:
It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little—however little—native luminosity? Surely we can’t be quite creatures?
But creatures we are.
We are creatures in need of God’s grace. Or to frame our situation in John’s words, “we love because he first loved us.”
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us “jolly beggars.” For this tangled absurdity that we have something to offer, “Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become ‘jolly beggars.’”
And on that “Black Friday,” that bright truth hit home.
Shedding my perceptions that I can create or sustain any love of my own — for God, friends, family, or the “unlovables” of my life, leaves me as happy recipient of God’s warm embrace of grace; delivering to others at home, work and play out of His treasury, and learning to recognize the gleam of God’s love even in the muted efforts of others.
Yes, I want to think I am loving (and even worthy of love), but what I’m learning is that I am really just a jolly beggar.
Notes:
"The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God . . .” from The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis. New York: HarperCollins. 1960. Page 152.
“We want to be loved for our cleverness . . . “ from The Four Loves, page 168.
“. . . not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.” From The Four Loves, pages 166-67.
“Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need . . .” from The Four Loves, page 168.