from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when [Aslan] began to tear the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.

from Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

It was then, lying there in the bed beside her sleeping husband, that Margaret Looney realised there was to be an emptying as much as a filling of her heart with love, and that as much as her heart had expanded and grown in the first girlish weeks of love in Donegal, filling her until bursting, now, in the years left, there was to be the slow drop by drop bleeding back of it all. It would all have to be given back, and day after day as the hardship of their life dulled into routine -- window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness -- Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.

from Traveling, a blog by my colleague Bethany Ferguson

John Updike says, “Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body. if the cells dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.” Resurrection is as much physicality as it is theology. Belief in the resurrection doesn’t just change how I understand the world, it also impacts how I interact with it, especially with the things that are broken. Even as it seems that things are falling apart, I work by faith for reversal, reknitting, rekindling, resurrection, and look to the One who has promised He is making everything new.

from The Four Loves, by CS Lewis

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.