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"Father, forgive them; they know not what they do" the words of the Crucified are the revelation of what is in fact the eternal attitude of GOD: they are the expression of a love that is wounded, cut to the heart and crucified, by the lovelessness, the ingratitude, the tragedy of human sin, but which nevertheless, in spite of the pain, is willing to forgive. But the Cross is no mere passivity.
A sentimental attachment would have been serviceless to him. Not so the woman allied by a purely rational bond: and he wanted guiding. Happily, she had told him too much of her feeble health and her lovelessness to be reduced to submit to another attack. She busied herself in her room, arranging for her departure, so that no minutes might be lost after her father had breakfasted and dressed.
I have succeeded in observing the phenomena of nature and of history with love and without prejudice, and the only evil I have discovered in their true essence is lovelessness. But this lovelessness also I explain to myself as an error, an error which must lead us from the state of natural unconsciousness to the knowledge of the solely beautiful necessity of love.
As the two sat there talking about the question of lovelessness in these relations, Herr Bucher strolled up from his flower beds and joined them in his Tyrolean jacket of the chase and big army boots. Gard said, "We were speaking of affection, Herr Bucher. Why do the Germans have the ideal of hate when other races are holding up the ideal of love?"
There are few bitterer sorrows than for a parent to see the children of his own sin in the sins of his children. Jacob might have felt that bitterness, as he looked round on the lovelessness and dark, passionate selfishness of his children, and remembered his own early crimes against Esau.
It seemed sometimes as if into that one short year of wifehood she had tried to crowd all the loving service and "babying" that had been accumulating through twenty years of lovelessness and loneliness. Nor did the doctor who had been forty-five on his wedding day, and who could remember nothing but loneliness and lovelessness on his part object in the least to this concentrated "tending."
But Paul seems to limit the action of love here to negative doing no ill. That is simply because the commandments are mostly negative, and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness natural to us all. But do we love ourselves only negatively, or are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm? That stringent pattern of love to others not only prescribes degree, but manner.
It was her unconscious protest against the lovelessness of her life. She put the blackthorn in water and contemplated its whiteness with delight; but it had not occurred to her that she might herself, with a little trouble, be as sweet and fresh as its blossom. The spiritualization of sex would be needed before such things would occur to her. At present she was sexless as a leaf.
The state of lovelessness is the state of suffering for the human race; the fullness of this suffering surrounds us now, and tortures your friend with a thousand burning wounds; but, behold, in it we recognize the glorious necessity of love: we call to each other and greet each other with the power of love, which would be impossible without this painful recognition.
I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly loving and obedient offering of self to the Father.
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