Today's Reading
If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily
ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly
as they felt the day before they were married’,
then it says what
probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly
undesirable if it were.
Who could bear to live in that excitement /for
even five years?
What would become of your work, your appetite, your
sleep, your friendships?
But, of course, [ceasing to be ‘in love’] need
not mean ceasing to love.
Love in this second sense—love as distinct
from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling.
It is a deep unity,
maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit;
reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace //which both partners
ask, and receive, from God.
They can have this love for each other even
at those moments /when they do not like each other;
as you love yourself
/even when you do not like yourself.
They can retain this love /even when
each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone
else.
내 자신이 싫어도 내 자신을 사랑하듯 다른이가 싫어도 사랑할 수 있다는 의미
‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this
quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
It is on this love //that
the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that
started it.
From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity.
Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S.
Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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