I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket —safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. - C S Lewis

Lewis's experience of love, vulnerability and heart-pain was profound and searing. He was a wounded man. He lost his childhood faith after losing his mother when he was nine, his best friend in WW1, then his father, and finally his wife. Through the balm of the love of friends, he found his faith again and learned to grasp the connection between his creaturely vulnerability and the vulnerability of the omnipotent Creator who, in the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered fully into human vulnerability, even submitting to degradation and death - for love. Just for love.

Without love, without its vulnerability, life has no meaning. Without love, I am a tinkling cymbal, walking around and making a little noise but barely human: as Lewis says, 'unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable'.

Life springs from love. Love is life-giving, in every sense. But it is life-taking, too – it requires no less than everything.

If you do not love enough, you are not truly alive. If you do love enough, you will be killed. - Herbert McCabe OP

Perhaps not physically killed like the Son of God, but if I love enough the price of love may indeed feel like a sort of death.

Grief is the price we pay for love - Queen Elizabeth II

To love is to become open, vulnerable. Without self-gift to the other and the embracing of one's vulnerability, if I am not prepared to accept pain as the price to be paid, it is not love. It is something, but it is not love.

Love alone can redeem. God is love. God alone can redeem.

Almighty God, the perfect fount of all love, who in Himself has need of nothing and no-one, so loved the world – us – unconditionally, with all His divine power, that His Majesty, the creator and sustainer of all, chooses to be vulnerable. Vulnerable as Jesus Christ, true God and true man, on earth, in time, two thousand years ago, and vulnerable now in the Blessed Sacrament of His Body and Blood.

I have loved you with an everlasting love. - Jeremiah, 31:3

In His Son, Jesus Christ, God suffered for love. And that same Son has told us that, to share in His life, to be alive, we must do the same:

Love one another, as I have loved you.  - John 15:12-17

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Almighty God, you love me no more and no less than you love every other man, woman and child: with an immense and total love beyond my imagining, poor creature that I am. 

Let me remember this, whenever I look at people whom I do not like, or even dislike, those I resent, who irritate or offend or threaten me, when I look at the enemies of my loved ones, even the enemies of your Divine Son. 

Make me remember your Son's command, in the very same moment when I would reject them. Remind me that, in that very same moment, you are gazing at me and asking me to love them, because you love them, all of them, every single one, with an immense and unimaginable love, exactly as you love me, sinful, shallow, soiled and ungrateful as I am. 

Let me become vulnerable to them, Lord, like your Son. Make me remember that your Beloved Divine Son was made so vulnerable by His great love for them, that He suffered torture and died a criminal's death for them. And for me. Make me understand that, through His dying for love, your Son, Our Lord, made every, infinitely precious one of them my brother, my sister. 

And that if that if that hurts me, it is meant to. If it costs me my life, so be it. Thy will be done.

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Ah, how easy it is to to write this at my comfortable desk. How hard to live it. And yet... of myself I can do nothing, but nothing is impossible with God.

Lord, teach me to love others as you have loved me. Take out of my flesh this heart of stone and give me a new heart of flesh. (cf. Ezekiel 36:26)

Love is His meaning. - Julian of Norwich