Blessed Steps

What we call 'being in love' is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense,  love is the great conqueror of lust.   No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, 'the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs'.  Being in love  is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it.  You cannot make it the basis of a whole life.  It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling.  Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.  Knowledge can l...

“The rule for all of us is perfectly simple.  Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.  As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets.  When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him…  There is, indeed, one exception.  If you do him a good turn,  not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are,  and to put him in your debt,  and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’,  you will probably be disappointed.”  Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis