Love of a jealous kind, 9.

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Envious love is basically selfish, it's basically about you. It starts being upset because I've lost love, but it ends in nothing but destructive anger. It's all about your ego, it's all about your hurt pride. Therefore what happens is love gets replaced by anger. Love goes away and you get very angry and you can even attack the person whose love you lost because you're so angry at them.

But then there's godly jealousy... In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul is being sarcastic, strong, confrontive, angry. Paul's love for them is angered love... His love is angered love, but it's godly because it stays love. Godly jealousy is angered love that stays love--and it's not so much about you and your hurt pride--it's about the loss of the relationship. 

Put another way: Godly jealousy is love fighting extinction; normal jealousy is love gone extinct because of your self-centeredness and because of your hurt pride... and now you just hate the person who loved you before. But godly jealousy is angered love that stays love, and stays committed to rescuing that crumbling love relationship and getting that person back.  

What provokes His jealousy is idolatry. 

Envious human jealousy, when you push, replaces love with anger... The selfishness and the pride just take the love and destroy it, you don't love them anymore. You just hate them... Godly love gets angry, but stays love. 

Human love, if pushed, will kill the lover who rejects. But God's love, when pushed, will die for the one who rejects Him. Will die--and has died, He has given Himself for us... Why is it in spite of our spiritual adultery can God stay with us and not reject us? How could God's angered love stay love? Because He died for us.

// "The Jealousy of God," Tim Keller's 2011 March 27 sermon on Exodus 20:1-6.

thank You for rescuing, reclaiming, loving me

for severe mercies that wound vanity until it is slain

for *loving-kindness and unrelenting pursuit after my heart.

Lord create in me a heart after Yours.
one that becomes more like Your heart in the seeking/seeing of it

*Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness (CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain).

All-good gifts.

Oh God, God,
why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell
if it is now doomed to crawl back—to be sucked back—into it? (CSL, A Grief Observed)

Teach me, Father

to accept all from your hand as good.

Perfect, even.

Teach me to give it all,

and re-receive Your gifts again

 from the nail-scarred hands of Christ.

For everything, and everyone

that You give and take away,

blessed be the name of the LORD.

Thank You, for I am not abandoned.

Inception makes me wanna SCUBA.

After weeks of being a cultural outcast, I finally watched Inception last night with Cat and Eugene.

Overall I feel slighted for my liking of the movie because I feel like the things I most appreciate are not the things being hyped. And most conversations have obsessively centered on determining the right interpretation of the plot, even though it seems to me that Nolan's commentary unambiguously transcends the alternate understandings...

On things like dream-sharing, lucid dreaming, reality, the sub/conscious, I don't find Nolan (even for his own work) or his latest movie all that original. Underneath that un-novel buzz is the real brilliance, in my opinion, and the director does a dearly effective job commenting on typically touchy subjects like grief, guilt, duty, exclusive truth. More on these in some later posts :)

My favorite parts:
[WARNING: May contain spoilers]

How to be at once unbearably needy and unselfish.

And another:

Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it. "She lives for her family," they said; "what a wife and mother!" She did all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send it out to a laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did. There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night (even in midsummer). They implored her not to provide this. They protested almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that they liked cold meals. It made no difference. She was living for her family. She always sat up to "welcome" you home if you were out late at night; two or three in the morning, it made no odds; you would always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you, like a silent accusation. Which meant of course that you couldn't with any decency go out very often . . .

Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said, would "work her fingers to the bone" for her family. They couldn't stop her. Nor could they--being decent people--quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help. Indeed they were always having to help. That is, they did things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn't want done . . .

But the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching . . . It must work towards its own abdication . . . Where it does not, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it . . . regards itself as "unselfish."

// CSL, The Four Loves, p. 50


You used to like Lewis.

A maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough.

To Joshua:

The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such ravenous love. But it works to their own misery and everyone else's. The situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved--their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity--produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very foundation for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more petrifies us again. And of course such people always desire the same proof of our love; we are to join their side, to hear and share their grievance against someone else. If my boy really loved me he would see how selfish his father is . . . if you loved me you wouldn't let me be treated like this . . .

And all the while they remain unaware of the real road. "If you would be loved, be lovable," said Ovid . . .

The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth and long years of her maturity up to the verge of old age all spend in tending, obeying, caressing, and perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough . . .

// CSL, The Four Loves, p. 41

You always did like vampires.

Now you see unveiled.

“Are the gods not just?”

“Oh no, child.

"What would become of us if they were?

"But come and see."

CSL, Till We Have Faces

No Answer

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

-- CSL, Till We Have Faces

Sibling Quibbling

Who knows me well knows that my 哥哥 is of l'importance to me. We are more like-minded I think than I am with anyone else... But really different in many ways too. I manage to learn more about myself from him that from any other friend. Always inspired astonished and/or admonished to see in him who I could be. People say we talk alike, i.e. the same shade of monotony, I guess. Some people say we look alike too, but it's not like I get confused and call my reflection Josh when I look in the mirror (usually).

Last week he gave in to this 5th-grade-esque survey-list thing that's been floating around Facebook, and since I haven't felt so up to shareable or pleasant introspection lately you can read about my brother in his words instead of more about me in more of mine.

Directions:

Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose 16 people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

1. My fear of death stems from not being able to know what will happen in a hundred or thousand years.
2. Anything I bring into my apartment eventually ends up on the floor.
3. I have two sets of leather couches, two bicycles, three computers, dozens of bottles of wine, hundreds of cigars, and no bed to sleep on.
4. C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters also altered my way of thinking, once upon a time.
5. I sometimes think I was born for a different time; I dream of things like building a home with my own hands, chopping down trees, tilling fields while pondering the meaning of life, grand adventures, and being generally self-sufficient.
6. I have a contingency plan for every situation you are capable of fabricating.
7. The sight of an object always brings back precious memories (I'm slowly purging myself of evil packrat tendencies).
8. Seeking brunette(s) with freckles and ambition.
9. I used to talk non-stop and get into trouble constantly.
10. I've actively avoided introspection the past three years.
11. I really like leather, especially in the form of shoes.
12. At the age of twenty-one I began to seriously question the concept of monogamy.
13. I also like wood, cotton, wool, silk and linen... Perhaps a little too much.
14. I need to learn the meaning of hard work.
15. I used to care what people say and catalog every conversation. Now I can rarely bring myself to give a damn.
16. I've given too much thought to being homeless or living in my car.

I think #3, 5, 11, 12, 13, 16 are relatively new. #9 "used to" is probably a huge understatement... Applies to hyperactive elementary school times and Sunday School when he'd rewrite the lyrics to all the songs. And Chinese school. And then one day he became this brooding intellectual thing.

And his heartwarming tags:

Justin, who always brings out the best in me
John, for the endlessly entertaining sexual tension
Jon L, who reminds me so much of myself yet is ostensibly nothing like me
Chris, always becoming more heroic in my eyes
Adam, i miss the contemplative j00zerker hidden inside
Jack, who i struggle with wanting to emulate
Keith, simultaneously a stranger and a brother to me
Jon S, who i miss more than i care to admit
Jennie, a symbol of simpler, happier times
Ariel, someone who somehow actually understands me
Esther, i trained you so well but now i find so much to learn from you
Nancy, always making me smile
Serena, possibly my foil
Winnie, our brief encounters always intrigue and inspire me
Joanna, always reminding me of the man i once wanted to be
Jess, for making it comfortable and easy to be my stupid self

My cop-out reply:

Esther Liu at 11:54pm December 15

1) I like to start things...

Joshua Liu at 1:19am December 16

that is perfection

I may or may not get around to writing a real note as the directions say. I've been in such a funk (underunderstatement) as of late but today things are and I am looking Up again.

Where Should I Be Now?

If God had granted
All the silly prayers I
Have made in my life...

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm.

Awake

"Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters."

And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied:

"Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know."

"But please, we don't know very much yet," said a nosey and snorty kind of voice.

"Creatures, I give you yourselves," said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. "I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so."

-- C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew.

Rereading all the Chronicles by next Thursday.

H for Hopkins

Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there's any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. That's what was really wrong with all those popular pictures... the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, 'No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose'?

A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis