On Love

the weight of love and the box we keep it in

“The Weight of Love”, by Cri Sood, 2025

It is not my habit to publish testimonials, essays or dissertations of any sort, preferring to keep them in my journals and notes, safely locked away. I have been pondering love lately … well, actually for many years. Recent events have caused me to focus on love more intently, so I have decided to write about it publicly (out of the box, as it were).

I see a growing emptiness in the world today, especially among our youth. Where love has been replaced by apathy and avoidance. The bent here is to try to place some religious or spiritual context on this, which might be appropriate if I were trying to proselytise, which I am not. Although I am not dismissing its influence. No, this is strictly a human and personal perspective. It is a lament.

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Into what Hell have we placed ourselves? Today, love is overused and undervalued; in the common day vernacular, it has become just another four-letter word. Maybe it has always been to some degree, but more apparent with our increased technology and communication. We love everything from food to cars, from the simple to the bling, from the natural to artificial, from personal entertainment to the commercial, from people to gods. We are unable to consciously distinguish one use of love from another, in part because our speech is becoming more familiar, more informal, and being bombarded by multiple sources to dumb us down to a more manageable common denominator. I believe it is important to know and be intentional about the different types of love. Unfortunately, in the lingua franca of our day, English, there is only one, all-encompassing word: love. Boiling all the complexities and nuances of love down into one word makes it easier to digest, distort and dismiss.

In reality, love is not that simple.

There is no safe “love” investment. The very nature of love is risk-taking, involving doubt and uncertainty, the unknown and fear. To love at all is to be open to the possible and be vulnerable. Love anything (person, place or thing), and your heart will certainly be squeezed or pummelled, maybe even broken. But here is the thinking amplified today: if you want to make sure of keeping your heart intact, you must give it to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap your heart carefully around your work, hobbies and those little transitory luxuries that keep you distracted and focused on yourself; avoid all attachments and entanglements; where love’s expression is devalued into a single, repeatable, unattached act; and lock your heart up safe in a box built by your own inadequacies and self-centredness. But in that “safe place”—hidden, secure, dark, motionless, airless—it will change, mutate. To be sure, it will not be bruised or broken; it will become hardened, unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable, unapproachable … lifeless. (This is to paraphrase CS Lewis, from his book The Four Loves.)

We are talking about your heart here, the core of your person, not some inanimate or imaginary object.

The alternative to this tragedy, or at the very least most assuredly accepting the risk of tragedy, is the separation from all that is good about being human and divinely created, that is, unique from all other life. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers, agitations and turmoil of love is Hell. It may be black-and-white thinking, but it is an undeniable fact and truth: not understanding and locking yourself away from love is removing yourself from all that makes us human and from the divine, putting yourself into a permanent state of limbo. I can think of no better or worse type of Hell.

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