Post-Script to “The Love-locks Bridge”

C. S. Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman. She died from cancer.

In a previous article, I reported and reflected on the “love-locks” bridge in Paris in which lovers have been putting padlocks on the bridge as a sign of their love.  I thought about this quote from C. S. Lewis, his book, The Four Loves:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

This is another reflection on those love-locks.  Locks are to keep things safe.  We think we can make safe the heart, especially as the “heart” is understood as the place of love (btw:  the “heart” in the Bible is the symbol of the will).   Lewis’ quote has poignancy in our day and time in which couples defer or do not have children. Changing one word in part of Lewis’ keen observation:

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even a child. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

I think this sounds “close to the bone”.   We even abort ‘inconvenient pregnancies”.  Marriage has devolved into worse than a reason for a divorce, a reason for a mutually agreeable business partnership with sex.  Love is not safe and put into a safe hoarding it, but extended to future generations.  “Be fruitful and multiply…”  Genesis 1:  28

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The Love-Lock Bridge

This is Paris’ Pont des Arts Bridge for pedestrians.  In the 2006 novel I Want You by Italian author Federico Mocca, 2 Roman lovers put a lock on a bridge and throw the key into the Tiber River.  This sparked a huge phenomenon in Paris in which several bridges are now completely encrusted with locks upon which love-struck tourist couples initial a padlock before attaching it to the bridge and throwing the key into the river.  The local magistrate ordered the padlocks removed from the Pont des Arts bridge since they weigh 45 tons and are threatening the bridge’s structural integrity. (Source:  The Week, June 12, 2015;  NY Times, “Paris Bridge’s Love Locks Are Taken Down”)

Couples in love instinctively seek a lock on their love because the innate understanding is “love is as strong as death” and “love never ends”.    So many songs are about the eternal nature of love.  Those two Scripture quotes indicate the everlasting nature of love for “…God is love…” and the Lord never ends.  I think in a day of such relativism, this  phenomenon of “love-locks” practically verifies the absolute Biblical truth from the Lord’s own creation of us, and the new creation in Christ, that we are created to love and  love never ends.  Love is supposed to as it is sensed by couples in love, you know “diamonds are forever” and the engagement ring.

 In the day in which “making love” has devolved into “hooking-up”, there is still this romantic instinct of  ‘eternal’ love.   I wonder, though, how many “love-locks” were put on the bridge, say, by one person coupling and decoupling?  It is not that sexual love is bad, for the Lord made husbands and wives so to  love.  The problem is what we do with said love. We want it to last, but we can not on our own.  I wonder how many of those couples wished, even within hours of putting that padlock on that bridge, they should not have thrown the key away!  

When many people say “God is love”, they really mean “love is God” (C. S. Lewis). Love on its own will not hold us fast.  There is only one way:  God’s holy love.  Love and holiness go together and the only “love-lock” that secures us is the love of  God in Jesus Christ for couples ‘falling in love’, and for friends, for families, with our neighbors and our enemies. The weight of those padlocks overloaded the Ponts des Arts bridge as  do all our fallen loves. Christ is the only love-lock bridge between God and man, between all men and women.  He has borne all our fallen love for our forgiveness because God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son (John 3: 16) and our unholy love broke Him and He is risen. Truly, “…love never ends”.    

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