“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 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.” -C.S. Lewis
I sat next down next to a dear friend at Hume Lake this past July minutes after I arrived. She had already been up at the camp for several weeks, so we had much to catch up with in each others lives. I was excited about a few things that had been going on recently, and yet I was so hesitant to just let myself go, and to jump in with both feet. Being the incredible friend that she is, she kindly told me that I had an issue. Shortly after explaining to her my fears and reservations she told me to follow her to her dorm, she had something she wanted to read to me.
Little did I know that with 6 short sentences the very way that I lived my life was challenged. Vulnerable had been one of the most frightening words in my vocabulary for far too long and she new exactly what I needed to hear. It is safe to say that I felt completely beat up by the words of C.S. Lewis.
The rest of the week that followed was spent considering these words. Was I willing to become ‘unbreakable, impenetrable and irredeemable’? No. Was I afraid? Yes. There comes a point in a persons’ life I think, when they must decide that they will no longer live to live up to the expectations of others. I didn’t want to be the strong one all of the time, the emotionless one or the control freak. I realized that I feel more like a human being when I am hurt or broken. And when I feel hurt and broken, it most likely stems back to the love of something – values, ideals and more often than those: a person.
As much as those words convicted me, and still continue to do, I understand change to be a process, one that seems to never have an end. I am more vulnerable today than I was 3 months ago, and I pray that I will continue to move forward and never backward.
I share this because I believe that we live in world ridden with dishonesty, betrayal and cynicism. We rarely know who we can trust, and even the most sacred of commitments to another person are broken more than 50% of the time. These statistics and realities of our world give plenty of reason to be shut down, cold hearted and turned off toward relationships of any kind. If I have remembered one thing that I have studied this semester it is that we create our own reality, and it is my intention to create a reality better than the one presented to me by those statistics that break my heart.
I hope that the words of C.S. Lewis are a challenge to you in the way that they are to me. What a sobering thought, that our lack of vulnerability is the embodiment of our selfishness.
May we all be persons whose hearts are able to be broken, penetrable and redeemable.
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