“When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.”
“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”
“Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”
“It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them…I empathically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it — that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that ‘they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.'”
“The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.
“It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle in our return to God; a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”
| The Four Loves