Shadowlands

This is the story of a man who found himself overtaken by surprise…

A man who, having passed through agonizing fire, discovered a wholly different sort of happiness in the most unlikely way, in the most unexpected place, and at the hands of an extraordinary person so different from himself that, had you informed him in advance, clearly and in detail, of exactly what was about to befall him he would have laughed you off as foolish or loony or both.

This is a man who had never been in love. The flesh interested him very little; it was the life of the mind he’d sought and achieved. This man long inhabited a world of ideas, not emotions, and the ideas in which he believed gave him comfort. He had already achieved what he believed to be an almost perfect happiness, and was convinced that he needed nothing he didn’t already possess...

For this man, there are three forms of love-Charis, which is the divine grace that is the root of the word “charity”; Agape, also defined as the love of God for humankind. But the third love, Eros, Greek god of love, is the destroyer, the mischievous shooter of the arrows of lust, who, in the words of blind Homer, “loosens the limbs and damages the mind.” Of these three, this man has chosen to experience only two. He has rejected the mischievous god Eros as unworthy, greatly inferior to Charis and Agape. And way, way too messy and inconvenient…

What if a man has never felt the need of another’s arms around him, holding him close to give him comfort, has never missed the sound of a child’s voice and a woman’s singing? Suppose he lives for many years without the agonies and ecstasies of physical love, lives until his heart seems to have shrivelled up like a raisin. If a sudden, unexpected flood of emotion, of desperate caring for another, should overtake him unawares, would that poor dried-up little heart burst asunder in one mighty explosion?