Currently Reading The End of the Affair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) By Graham Greene see related

Book One, Chapter Seven: “Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God,’ and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man.  But I suppose there are different kinds of desire.  My desire now was nearer hatred than love…”

Remember the song Awesome God from Sunday school?  Perhaps some churches still sing it in their services today.  “Our God is an awesome God.  He reigns from Heaven above.  With wis-dom, power and love, our God is an awesome God.”  When I went to church as a child, I can recall the Sunday school teachers requesting different adjectives to describe God when we sang this song.  The teachers would then choose a select few describers and we would sing the song again but with the chosen adjectives replacing the word ‘awesome.’  Timid at first, the adults would provide a few catalyst words such as ‘holy’ or ‘merciful’ and then we would follow up with ‘loving’ or ‘great.’  Indubitably, one of the teachers would always put ‘jealous’ on the board as we struggled to come up with way to describe the abstract Being we didn’t quite understand.  “How about jealous?” one older lady would always say.  After a couple times of this, we good little Christina boys and girls picked up on our indoctrination and would reply when asked for adjectives worthy of the Most Worthy, “Jealous.”  I didn’t really grasp what that meant then and I still don’t completely understand it now.  Did God not want us loving anyone else but Him, such as our parents or dog, or was it more of a way to describe God’s anger when we intentionally or unintentionally worshipped idols?  Here is another song describing God’s jealousy.  I don’t know what it all means but I like it because it emphasizes with my own unfaithfulness and fear and it sings of a God that wants me.

Jealous Kind by Jars of Clay
I built another temple to a stranger
I gave away my heart to the rushing wind
I set my course to run right into danger
Sought the company of fools instead of friends

You know I've been unfaithful
Lovers in lines
While you're turning over tables with the rage of a jealous kind
I chose the gallows to the aisle
That that love would never find
Hanging ropes will never keep you
And your love of a jealous kind
Love of a Jealous Kind

Tryin' to jump away form rock that keeps on spreading
For solace in the shift of the sinking sand
I'd rather feel the pain all to familiar
Than be broken by a lover I don;t understand
'Cause I don't understand

Book Two, Chapter Two: “I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all…Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better.  Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.  In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.  Even before the days of Mr. Parkis I was trying to check on her: I would catch her out in small lies, evasions that meant nothing except her fear of me. For every lie I would magnify into a betrayal, and even in the most open statement I would read hidden meanings.  Because I couldn’t bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand.
‘Wouldn’t you want me to be happy, rather than miserable?’ she asked with unbearable logic.
‘I’d rather be dead or see you dead,’ I said, ‘than with another man. I’m not eccentric. That’s ordinary human love.  Ask anybody. They’d all say the same—if they loved at all.’ I jibed at her. ‘Anyone who loves is jealous.’

Excerpt from Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis: “I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved.  Would a father see his daughter happy as a whore?”

Book Two, Chapter Eight: “It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”

I often wonder what love is and in my wonderings I frequently arrive at the conclusion that love is always selfish.  (Not all who wander are lost, but they may sometimes end up in the ghetto.)  It seems to me that most of the time I love because it makes me feel good or my reward is someone loving me back.  I think…I hope there is more to it than that.  I picture a Divine love as being more than that.  A loving God—a God that is love—is not self-seeking but loves simply for the sake of love.  He loves because that is what He does, that is what He is, not because He wants to be worshiped.  Perhaps this is heresy or perhaps I am doing a poor job of explaining what I mean, but there seems to be something more to love than what we, or at least I, know and that something more is what true love actually is.

Book Three, Chapter Seven: “Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved You?  Or was it really you I loved all the time?  Did I touch You when I touched Him?  Could I have touched You if I hadn’t touched him first, touched him as I never touched Henry, anybody?  And he loved me and touched me as he never did any other woman.  But was it me he loved, or You?  For he hated in me the things You hate.  He was on Your side all the time without knowing it.  You willed our separation, but he willed it too.  He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love.  For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn’t anything left, when we finished, but You.  For either of us.  I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that.  But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had.  You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You.”

Excerpt from The Last Battle (The Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis: "Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honor) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."