Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

Our Mercenary Heart

Our Mercenary Heart

I have been pondering this bit about the “mercenary heart” all afternoon.

The crux of it being that love itself is a uniquely self-less action.

I do not believe this is the same as “instincts,” which are natural.

Love is natural too.

But love is also profoundly human, and therefore theological.

A love enjoying their lover is no bribe, is it?

We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)

Are Relationships Worth It?

Are Relationships Worth It?

Are relationships worth it?

Well. They are if they are the right kind.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be “loved” by anyone with some kind of timid and shy love, bordering on pleasantries.

I want something deep and worth fighting for.

An emotion that makes one grit their teeth and stirs a feeling they never knew they had…

I like how I have seen, and come to understand, different aspects of love as the years have gone by. Parents. Faith. Friends, Spouse. Children.

Maybe we all are just looking for relationships worth our time – worth giving our lives for?

Understand: Relationships are all there is.

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)