Still

One
Originally uploaded by mincaye.

I finished C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves sometime last week. An excellent book, I probably appreciated his chapter on friendship most of all, because it expressed so precisely, in words, a lot of what I have been feeling lately.


So here are some random excerpts from Friendship:

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Frienship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

In a perfect Friendship... each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest... Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions, when four or five of us after a hard day's walking have come to our inn;... Life -- natural life -- has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances... Christ, who said to the disciples 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'... [Friendship] is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.


T.S. Eliot ends his poem East Coker with these words, and I think it speaks of the journey my friends and I are on:

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


Finally, there are the words of Tolkien, spoken through Aragorn (I don't know if these words appear in the book, or only in the movie; at any rate, they are too good to be ignored):

"A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day."


Indeed, it is not this day. And we shall be still, and still moving. As one in Christ.