“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly
superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates
the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no
tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back
pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves,
the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of
back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may
dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own
parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him.
Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all
loves.”—British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves (1960)
(The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion,
by German 16th-century painter Peter Gertner.)
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