“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
-C.S. Lewis
I was so happy to come across this C.S. Lewis comic based on the beloved writers quote about the vulnerability of love. This quote instantly reminded me of the Parable of the Talents-Mt 25:14-30 (watch animated video) in which the three servants were entrusted with different levels of responsibility "according to his ability" and rewarded or punished for their faithfulness.
The third servant hid his talents away out of fear and had nothing to show but his fear when the master came back to him. Fear is a strong and powerful beast that paralyzes us and steals our trust in others. To give our heart to another is to put ourselves in the most vulnerable position because we are able to be so deeply wounded emotionally, and that hurts worse than any physical pain. Vulnerability is often understood as weakness and especially hard for those who have been wounded through their vulnerability in the past. However to love and to be vulnerable is human. This is why we come into the world and leave the world in such physical, emotional, and spiritually vulnerable positions.
There is of course a balance between sharing your heart with everyone and locking it in a box of bitterness. We are entrusted to properly guard our heart while loving others to our greatest ability at all times. To those whom much is given, much is expected - Lk 12:48.
We will be rewarded for how we have loved and not how others have loved us back.
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