A Great Love Song is a moment of ecstasy frozen into words, a rhapsody of enthusiasm and passion, a metaphoor pointing to a moment....
God's love song is in many ways like other great love songs. Its human writer St. Paul ... saw ... into love's ideal form... [H]is love song draws a profile of ideal love, but it is too plain for mystic passion. Love is not jealous, does not get angry quickly, endures very much -- these are qualities for ordinary living in ordinary days. This is our challenge: to find ways to bring the heavenly rhapsody down into our own worldly realities (mine emphasis).
Great stuff! No wonder I found 1 Cor 13:4-8 bland. The list of "Love is patient ... kind ... not envious" is only a profile. It's the sun ray but not the sun itself.
Love Within Limit explores how selfless love "can take root in the crevices of real life." Love, the author assumed, is a power of "selfless love works only within the tissues of our self-interested lives."1
I get my orientation straightened out, finally. I shouldn't be spending time to read the book now, but I think I would. More to come later.
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1 Lewis Smedes, Love Within Limits (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979), xii.
5 comments:
Thanks for the sharing, I can see your excitement, but I don't think I am getting what you are getting without reading the book itself. I hope they sell it in the Alliance bookstore in town, or else, I will have to wait until we go back to Hong Kong next April.
I plan to write more. I'm at the 4th chapter, absorbing the shock from realizing that I have within me near to zero (if not zero) the kind of agapic love described in 1 Cor 13.
Finishing the topics of longsuffering, patience, & kindness, I recall two mentors separately commmented that I lacked patience and compassion.
On the contrary, the counter-examples Smedes uses when he explained "rudeness" remind me of how I subconsciouly operate. Here's the definition he gave, "The rude person is the one who is so hell-bent on staying upright that in his anxiety he cuts and bruises anyone who threatens him, even as he uses anyone who can help him" (p.33).
I'm praying that God gives me this agape love. One can't grow it, can't develop it. It's a power that needs to be given from Above, and then one exercises it "in the crevices of real life."
There're books which enlighten, and there're some that ignite your passion inside, and you can't help but want to finish it. To me Rick Warren's are near, Smedes' and Larry Crabb's are exactly those.
Congratulation and thankful for you spending time on it.
(busy and coughing...)
You take care, ablogaday.
I am so amazed to come across this blog as I searched for Father Smedes's book on "Love within Limits"
I am teaching 1 Corinthians about love and marriage and freedom in Sunday School for baptised Christians.
As a lot of my classmates don't read English, some of us is summerizing the key message in Chinese.
As we summerize, we digest and reflect on Dr Smedes' message more and more. We are sincerely blessed by his message about love.
I thought that he is a Catholic Father...please correct me if I am wrong.
Truly blessed by this new reflection on Agape Love, and yet so practical and near to our daily liFe!!!!!!!!!!!
We'd do the whole of the Love song by Paul!!!
Chinese summary:
Sze On Dec 07
English summary:
Loner loved by Jesus Dec 07
Of course these summaries are not perfect and reading the original book is the BEST!!!
Blessings & Merry X'mas!!!
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