The white ring of flowers is placed over her new black veil, and there is the heavily warm silence of rejoicing; a moment of true quiet, like the oddly hot and silky
Santa Ana winds in a
Santa Barbara night.
She then appears in the hall under the church, resplendent in her grey and black habit, her face joyful but shy, but her expression a bit flat- as though all the clapping and attention were too much for her. The slightly far away look is of one who is used to the safety of the habit and the convent, a translucent pansy, a greenhouse creature, a woman of prayer, a Spouse of Christ.
The rest of us, with heart-skins roughened by jobs, parenting and trying to be good spouses, have witnessed her marriage to Christ. A friend turns to me and muses, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be married to Christ?” I smile, thinking it a nice observation, considering the event. She goes on. “No, really. Really. To be able to have a spouse that you could really give your whole being- no reservations, no doubts, no anger at another imperfect human being.” Was it jealousy of another’s choice? “ No, not jealousy. I mean, I know we are all meant to be all for God, but I just think it would be easier to go to Him as a spouse, instead of always feeling torn-torn, between your duties and feelings about your own spouse, and your desire to give yourself to God entirely. It’s confusing, to say the least.”
Out of all the images, sounds and ideas of that day, that Profession of Vows, it was the strange dichotomy between the ring of white flowers on a new black veil, and the scratched gold ring on the worn hand of that woman which stayed with me. The question kept coming back to me, “How do you get to Christ as a spouse while married?”
In John Paul II’s play, The Jeweler’s Shop, there is a very powerful moment: a woman is wandering the streets at night, dazed and in emotional pain. Her marriage is a wrecked house, her faith its cracked foundation. She has decided to complete the ruination by finding a lover in the worst way possible: like a prostitute. A car pulls up. She looks at the man, his face disfigured by the rivulets of rain falling down the window. She reaches out for the door handle, and he opens the door. Jarringly she realizes that, although he looked totally foreign before, he suddenly has the face of her estranged husband. She backs away and stumbles down the street. Her clumsy flight is stopped by a priest sees her and who providentially, knows her from years past, when she was a young bride. My memory of the play is that she confesses her intentions and the vision of her husband’s face, in the place of a man she was hoping would somehow 'save' her from her misery; she tells him of her feeling that God has abandoned her. The priest replies, “Daughter, the face of the Lord will, in this life, have the face of your husband- and none other.”
It is a profound statement, at many levels, and more profound than I can hope to illuminate. The depth is such that it must be lived in order to understand it. The vitriolic reaction would be one, most likely of dismay; a disillusionment of romantic visions about Our Lord. And perhaps this is exactly what is good. The Lord was “A man of Sorrows, afflicted, not of comely feature..” Most of us may not have recognized the Lord in His earthly life, because He chose to be so ordinary- as familiar as the face of the spouse. The Jews, especially the ones more deeply steeped in the laws and religious practices at the time, missed Him, because He was the “son of a carpenter”. He must have been tanned, shouldering rather simple clothes, fitting in with the semi-poor of the time. It must have been impossible to recognize the Word, except perhaps if you observed Him more closely, and listened more closely. Perhaps if you watched the children with Him, or looked deeply into His eyes and saw the stars, or, as songwriter Bruce Cockburn says, “saw the way the dust swirled around His feet.”
It is this way with love. In his seminal work, I and Thou, the Jewish phenomenologist Martin Buber describes from many viewpoints the phenomena of two persons, two Others in a face to face relationship. It is the deepest relationship but in human terms, fraught with the most danger of becoming too narrow, into becoming narcissistic or other-worship. The great Catholic philosopher, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, in his book Man and Woman, baptizes Buber’s insights on the I and Thou relationship as only a great Catholic philosopher can achieve. It is not the “we”, the “side by side” relationship of friendship, wherein we look out at something together and share it. The I and Thou relationship is essentially different from this. It is a “face to face” relationship. Two persons are engaged with eachother, a holy relationship to the exclusion of the outside world. It is such a profound relationship because it , as Buber elucidates, produces fecundity- in other more pedestrian terms, this relationship is the catalyst for fertility, physical fertility in the begetting of children, and as Hildebrand develops, spiritual fertility: begetting love and true sight; begetting grace and changing each other into a unity, a new creature. So we would have had to look at the Lord this way in His earthly life, in order to recognize Him, and we must look at Him this way now, in the humble appearance of the Eucharist. Our souls, whether we are male or female humans, are female in the I and Thou relationship with God.
Our grand and glorious destiny is to become a new creature in Christ, in this I and Thou relationship. The story of Israel in the Old Testament is a forerunning image of this relationship God wants with each of us personally. One only has to read the passages in the Old Testament wherein God seeks after the straying Israel as a husband seeking his wife. By far the most distilled essence of this I and Thou relationship of God to Israel, God to Our Blessed Mother, and God to each one of us, is contained in the Canticle of Canticles. The I and Thou relationship is a running theme throughout God’s relationship to man, from the Old Testament to the Apocalypse.
Marriage is simply the incarnational, natural counterpart to this God-to-man relationship. It is one of the down-to-earth, natural ways which Our Lord uses to develop the understanding of the relationship He wishes to have with each of us. In a marriage, the I and Thou relationship still retains its ability to produce fecundity on both the physical and metaphysical levels. We beget children, and we become one flesh with another, we can fecundate the spouse’s spiritual growth. Dietrich Von Hildebrand says that rather than love being blind, it rather sees more clearly who the other is, sees things that no one else can see. In other words, in the I and Thou relationship, we see the truth about the other; and it is beautiful, tragic, glorious and frustrating all at the same time. Only in the I and Thou relationship with God are we compelled to fall to our knees in utter adoration at what and Who we see; with another human being, we are compelled mostly to nurture and to pity: and ultimately, by sowing unselfish, sacrificial love, to help in the salvation of the spouse. In phenomenological terms, as married persons, we are to cultivate the I-Thou relationship with the spouse in order to learn how to love God, and to help the other by forgiving, affirming and healing. Then, the marriage should develop again, back into a “We” relationship: but now the “We” is looking together at God, encouraging in the spouse the I-Thou relationship with Christ. In short, we are to aid the spouse to become a Spouse of Christ, by being the incarnational healing and love for that person.
The purpose of human marriage is multiple. We are angel-beasts, we have instincts and were told to be fruitful. The Church has always taught that the primary purpose of marriage is to co-create with Him new life. This is profound enough all by itself, but there are other purposes: companionship, an economic partnership, the making of a home, and a domestic church. What about the spiritual aspect of marriage? This is something that has been somewhat neglected, except perhaps by John Paul II; indeed, his writings on human marriage and the body are perhaps his greatest legacy to us. Somehow, mysteriously, the I and Thou relationship in a human marriage is the doorway for most people into that archetypical I and Thou relationship with God for which every person is created, the Beatific Vision. How is this? Here, I am venturing into my own musings: In a marriage, we see the truth of another person, and in their eyes, we see the truth about ourselves. In many, if not most cases, this is a painful progession from illusions to reality. What we do when we reach the reality, in all its failures and ugliness, is what we do with Our Lord on His cross, and the crosses in our hum drum daily life. When we reach the bottom of another’s personhood, when we see the truth, the beauty and potential alongside the selfishness and boorishness, we must make a choice. Many marriages end here, and the progression is away from an I and Thou relationship to a narcissistic existence, or to an abyss, which must be filled at all costs; or to repentance amidst the ruins. This journey into the depths of another is parallel to the journey of God with Israel. They saw Him first from afar, a cloud of fire. Then they heard His voice, and they knew He fought for them and punished them. Their knowledge of Him was from afar, but He was looking at them in particular. And they began, in their prophets, to look at Him. They made vows to forsake all others for Him, and He dwelt with them in the Holy of Holies. And then He came as a Man and He came as a humble Man, and He loved, and He became as a malefactor for love, He became the lamb of slaughter, He was lifted up like the snake in the desert, and they knew him not.
In a marriage, what happens when we look at the other, and we realize that we know him not? It is because love, in all its forms, eros, agape, storge, but mostly caritas, leads us to this place and then gives us a choice to go on, or to turn away. Our eros and agape and storge are all burned in this purgatory of the I and Thou relationship, and we are left with caritas. It is caritas which takes us beyond the bottom, and then we begin to discover the baptized forms of eros, storge and agape. And then, then, will we be ready to venture past the I and Thou relationship with a human spouse, and together with that spouse, become a “We” relationship again: but on a profound level, whereby we see God together. Our hearts will have been burned in the fire of a marriage, and then the gold of choosing to love in the face of suffering and disillusionment will shine out to God. C.S. Lewis wrote a book which he said was his personal favorite. It is called Till We Have Faces, and is the story of a soul’s journey from spiritual blindness to being able to see the truth about herself and the one she loved, and then finally to seeing God. The climactic line in the book, I think, sums up the spiritual purpose of marriage: “ How are we to meet God face to face until we have faces?” The I and Thou relationship of marriage is meant to give us faces, give us the truth about ourselves, to rip away all the roles and facades we are taught to assume- and then the relationship asks us to love from within that place of truth. Only from there can we truly see God.
Note: This article is an excerpt from a book on which I am currently at work (TRWK)
