It doesn’t take much to be a friend indeed to a friend in need. It doesn’t take a whole heck of a lot to sit and listen. To lend a compassionate ear. The kind of conversation that incorporates patience and kindness. To encourage a space that is safe and induces healing to occur. To be a manifestation of God’s lovingkindness in an active moment. To embody Grace, and give of it freely. It shows someone that the kind of unconditional love that comes from God does exist, and even if someone is on their deathbed, that can be a miraculous healing balm to the Soul.

I’m not talking about superficial gossip or gripe sessions. In his book, The Four Loves, author CS Lewis comments on people who seem to have the world at their fingertips but just refuse to be happy. He describes it as “the demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that hell should be able to veto heaven” This can become a virus of negativity and discontent. A malaise that has the capability of spreading from person to person, if one is not awake and aware, refusing to dive down into darkness, keeping their light shining brightly.

We have become so used to complaining that, as Lewis aptly puts it, “We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock.” What he means is, we tend to conduct personal interactions based on ego terms, but, when a conversation becomes elevated as to communicate soul to soul, it can be somewhat shocking. Our soul kind of does a double-take, and quickly tries to decide how to respond. But we will need to get used to it because this elevated level of communication is fast becoming the new normal.

Our world is rapidly shifting from ego mind-based matrix to something that is much more profound. Something that makes one want to be awake, and participate in their world. To awaken in man, a supernatural appreciative love for all the gifts life has to offer. When we take a moment to listen to someone who is truly in need, we nibble the precipice of Angelic action. Lewis, once more offers, “This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible.” It is the act of carrying divine love in order to be divine love when needed, or, called upon. We can be this loving, this compassionate, this honest, we only need to summon the courage. He goes on, “God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love. Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting.”

On Being Human

by CS Lewis

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
                 Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
                 -An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang —can angels measure it?
                 An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
                 —An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they!  I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
                 Forever ours, not theirs.