till we have faces

February 12, 2010

"Well!" I was saying. "You have made me little better than the Lord Bardia's murderer. It was your aim to torture me. And you chose your torture well. Be content; you are avenged. But tell me this. Did you speak only to wound, or did you believe what you said?"

"Believe? I do not believe, I know, that your queenship drank up his blood year by year and ate out his life."

"Then why did you not tell me? A word from you would have sufficed. Or are you like the gods who will speak only when it is too late?"

"Tell you?" she said, looking at me with a sort of proud wonder. "Tell you? And so take away from him his work, which was his life (for what's any woman to a man and a soldier at the end?) and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mind that he was no longer his?"

"And yet-he would have been yours."

"But I would be his. I was his wife, not his doxy. He was my husband, not my house-dog. He was to live the life he thought best and fittest for a great man -not that which would most pleasure me. You have taken Ilerdia now too. He will turn his back on his mother's house more and more; he will seek strange lands, and be occupied with matters I don't understand, and go where I can't follow, and be daily less mine - more his own and the world's. Do you think I'd life up my little finger if lifting it would stop it?"

"And you could-and you can-bear that?"

"You ask that? Oh, Queen Orual, I begin to think you know nothing of love. Or no; I'll not say that. Yours is Queen's love, not commoners'. Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods. Like the shadowbrute. They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don't they?"

A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.

(Till We Have Faces, 263-265, 266)

CS Lewis is a brilliant man. His books Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce, The Four Loves, and A Grief Observed depict so clearly and simply what is love and what is not, and lately, I've come to realize that what we call 'love' nowadays, really is not. What we call 'love' is really but foolishness when put into comparison with what God had intended love to be. Our 'love' nowadays are but another guise for selfishness, possessiveness, and a whole lot of other ugly things, but we pretty it up by saying that it's because we love, when really, maybe we just love ourselves, misplaced love indeed, when we should be loving God first. And maybe that's one of the greater reasons why today, we see less and less of God-intended-love, because we've misplaced it. Our minds say we love God first, but our hearts, our actions, our very lives &being beg to differ. Our relationships thus thrown off their intended course, into what seems to be just a devouring of each others' lives, minds, time, and bodies.

And, above, I have included an excerpt that shows the difference between the two women's way of loving. The Queen's love often just became possessive, one that seeks to make the other person wholly theirs at all costs, under the guise of 'love'. The other woman (Lord Bardia's wife), however, sought to allow the other live out his life the way he thought best, even if he were not wholly hers. I do not think either woman's 'love' is the 'correct' one, though the wife's love seemed to be a bit less selfish. In the novel, I think the best description of what love should be (and lewis may have intended it to be so) is Psyche's love, but I guess you'll have to read it to know how she loved.

I think it's easier to know what love is not, than to know what love is. To know what love is would require us to avert our eyes away from the false portrayals of it in songs, movies, and general media, and focus upon Jesus. Learning to love Him, while learning to receive His love, before we can learn to love others the way we ought to. I believe that as we delve more into the love of God, we'll become more and more unsatisfied with the cheap imitations around us, and we'll begin to slowly realize how perfect, beautiful, and wholesome God had actually intended love to be.