Lorien's Leaf

I have been reading Graham Greene's The End of the Affair for the third time. I am enjoying looking back over my old college notes and highlights. What I was moved by at the ripe old age of 21 is so different from what I notice about the novel now. All I could see then was the consequences of adultery and the stunning self-sacrifice Sarah displayed after her dramatic conversion. She prays,

Dear God, I've tried to love and I have made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I'd know how to love...I believe the legend, I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don't mind my pain. It's [her husband's and ex-lover's] pain I can't stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if you could only come down from the cross for a little while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.

This quote reminds me a lot of John Donne's sonnet XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God: for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like a usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

It has been a long time since I have been able to pray like this; with such passion and abandon. Getting older means experiencing life at its best and worst, and the worst of it leaves scars. For many 21 year-olds pain is dramatic and overwhelming, but that is because it is new. The blood is let for the first time and it leaves the wounded wide-eyed and wondering. But suffering in one's 30's is different. The wounds have multiplied, gone deeper, left scars. If not careful, the wounded can develop a habit of flinching and shutting eyes tight. Hardheartedness and a quiet distrust can become the bandages.

So what I am saying is that this time I am relating a lot to Bendrix. It is so easy to excuse his cynicism & bitterness- his cruelty. I wonder what his childhood must have been like... He doesn't know how to love... He is lost in his own hellish imagination and can't find his way out.

I have wondered sometimes whether eternity might not after all exist
as the endless prolongation of the moment of death...

I feel so sorry for him! And feel akin to him, and I realize that in feeling sorry for him I am feeling sorry for myself!
Sort of pathetic, really.
The thing is, at 21 I had no idea what love really was or what it would demand. Marriage vows and children take self-sacrifice to a whole new level and I am often overwhelmed. So the kind of prayers that Sarah and John Dunne prayed make me afraid. I am afraid that I cannot handle that kind of love, that I will cease to exist.

But these fears are lies of course. It is in self-sacrificial love that one is reborn. The End of the Affair begins with this quote by Leon Bloy,

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters
suffering in order that they may have existence.

God give me courage.