Life at a distance?

This quote has been on my mind of late:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness… We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.” C.S. Lewis The Four Loves.

It defined my life for many years and I did not even know it.  Lately I've felt Someone chipping away at the tomb in which my heart lies, and it is not a pleasant process, but I would not trade one tear for the oblivious, uncaring life I once knew.  For at last I am alive, if a broken shattered mess, I have a heart at last.  How many of us live in such a state, nay rather merely exist: drifting from one day to another, oblivious of the pain, sorrow, and hurt experienced by our fellow men, caring only about our clothes or music or food or latest social media status and thinking ourselves happy?  It is a strange thing, Joy, it can be found amid the dust and ashes of sorrow but never in the fickle, oblivious world that is modern culture.  For to have joy, one must know love and to know love, one must risk sorrow.  Our society hates pain of any kind be it emotional, spiritual, or physical, and finding ways to avoid or ameliorate it has become our national past time, hence the growth of vapid entertainment, prescription drug use, and uncommitted relationships.  But in hiding from pain, we also hide from life.

Life is messy and painful and to be fully lived we must embrace both, else we are just passive observers watching someone else's existence on TV though it is our own.  We all want to be happy but no one wants to risk getting hurt, but then we wonder why we can't be happy.  You can't have joy without the risk of sorrow, at least not on this mortal earth.  We need to get out hands dirty, risk getting our hearts stepped on, and actually live, otherwise what is the point?  Go find joy!