Wisdom from C.S. Lewis

I have shed an infinite amount of tears in Guatemala, especially in this past month. Being surrounded by poverty, injustice, pain, suffering, and death has taken a toll on my heart. At times I wish I could just stop caring—that I could do my job without getting too emotionally involved. It would spare me a lot of crying.

But whenever those selfish self-preserving thoughts come to mind, I read the words of a man far wiser than I can ever hope to be to remind myself that the pain of a hurting heart is much preferable to a heart that is incapable of feeling pain at all:

“In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him. Then he draws a moral…All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

Of course this is excellent sense. Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of. And there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’

…[But] 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 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

-C.S. LEWIS from “The Four Loves”