Gabrielle Hunt - Outside Reading 4

Gabrielle Hunt

19 April 2012

Outside Reading 4

Shame-Faced Love

“I doubt we ever catch Affection beginning,” Lewis says of his first type of love. Affection is the love between a child and a parent, the love for a coworker, the love for the neighbor you wave at when you pick up your mail in the morning. “To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time.” This kind of loves requires only familiarity. A person who orders their coffee from the same barista each morning might have this sort of love for that barista, as the barista may have in return for their repeat customers.

I was attracted to his use of the phrase “shame-faced,” implying that Affection is the type of love that we most often will not admit to. He used a humorous example of a dog secretly being fond of a cat, yet being unable to tell his fellow canines, but I could think of many personal illustrations of this concept. With this possibility in mind as I continued reading, I was slightly surprised when, in the midst of his list of perpetrators of Affection, he used fellow churchgoers as an example. This should hypothetically be irreconcilable, the combination of shame-faced love and the church family. Automatic piety initially prevents me from admitting to the possibility that the two could be combined…but they are paired far more often than any of us would like to admit. The books of Corinthians would not like us to describe love as shame-faced, especially when the object of our affection is our brother in Christ.

We must step away from that selfish sense of shame in order to learn a lesson about unselfish love; when we can admit to our affection for the lesser-liked participants in our everyday lives, and describe them as being likeable “in their own way,” we are accepting ways of being likeable that are different than those we feel that affection should come from.  “We are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.”