February 26 through March 19, 2023

C.S. Lewis' 'The Four Loves'

Join the Rev. Alan Murchie, associate for music and education, and the Rev. Joseph Rose, assistant rector, for a series of coffee hour forums on C.S. Lewis’ wise and warmly personal book exploring the nature of human and Christian love, which draws in sources from Jane Austen and St. Augustine. Each Sunday, Alan and Joe will explore one of Lewis’ four loves – storge, philia, eros and agape – and discuss ways for people to open themselves to all forms of love to bring us closer to God during Lent.

Sunday, February 26
Storge: “store-gae” meaning affection
Affection covers an array of loves. Like animals, the care of mother to babe is a picture of affection. It relies on the expected and the familiar. Lewis describes it as humble. “Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives..." *

Sunday, March 5
Philia: Friendship
Friendship is the love dismissed. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” says Lewis, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why? Perhaps we know it’s the most time consuming, the least celebrated, the one we could live without. Perhaps too, as Lewis says, “few value it because few experience it.” *

Sunday, March 12
Eros: Romantic Love
Different than friendship, lovers, “are always talking to one another about their love” and “are normally face to face, absorbed in each other,” says Lewis. The danger in romantic love is to follow blindly after a feeling of passion. Then, we celebrate the passion and think its absence means such love has died. Certainly, true romance is not so fickle. *

Sunday, March 19
Agape: Charity or Selfless Love
This is our chief aim, the unconditional love of the Father given to us through his Son. Affection, friendship and romantic love are each the training ground for charity to grow. It’s also a rival to the three. Lewis mentions St. Augustine’s deep loss of a friend who says that such desolation is what occurs when we give our heart to anything but God. “All human beings pass away,” says Lewis. “Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of.” Yet, we are made to love and we are in want of it. If we play it safe, we are not living out the Gospel, but burying the coin in the safe ground, as the parable says. *

** Taken from the C.S. Lewis official website: www.cslewis.com/four-types-of-love

Series will be held on Sundays at 11am in the parish hall. Coffee and refreshments served and all are encouraged to attend.