Status Updates From The Four Loves

I am underlining most of this book! So, so good!!

Really interesting to read the context around quotes I've not only frequently quoted but frequently try to walk in.

“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word Glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one… And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the ‘love’ of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.”

“But where Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it not to ‘die on us’ once the need is no more. That is why the world rings with complaints of mothers whose grown-up children neglect them and of forsaken mistresses whose lovers’ love was pure need—which they have satisfied.”

“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”

“Our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but it, the Divine life operating under human conditions.”