“My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”
- Psalm 51:17
“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.”
- C.S. Lewis The Four Loves
It is easy to be invulnerable. Close yourself off to everyone, form no attachments, take no risks and nothing will harm you. Hide from the light, spit at all things beautiful, and reject all meaning and you will never feel pain. Ground yourself utterly in this temporal world, in its mechanical certainty and cold stability and you would need neither faith nor doubt. You would only have indifference.
That is death. It is a slow but sure death leaving one dry and empty like a shriveled corpse. This temporal world is only animated by eternity. All that is good in this world only comes from eternity. Eternity is not some far off thing, not simply an elongation of the regular course of time, but something beyond time, and yet without it there is no life and no beauty. Without it there is no future and no past. Eternity invades the present with nobility and truth and glory. We can close ourselves off from this fiery river that flows from the throne of God and be burned or we can embrace the heavenly pain of vulnerability, risk, and love and be filled with the holy flame of eternity.
Eternity demands all we are, supreme vulnerability, supreme dependence on God. It means we must die to the old cold self who hid from the light with its invulnerable shell. That self must be torn asunder. Eternity tears us apart, lights our every nerve on fire with unbearable pain, undoes everything that we are. It is only through this total self annihilation that we can embrace the endless love of God that is eternity.
So we should rejoice in our tears, in our vulnerability, in our weakness because it is this that our dead self falls away like flakes of skin. We should revel in our reckless love, in our foolish attachments, in mourning over trampled flowers. There is no fault in gentleness. Not a single drop of love is ever wasted. For even as we are torn apart, love stitches us back together and makes us new, opens us wider to flooding eternity until the pain is no more and all we feel is the fiery glory of God pervading all the universe.