Killing Love

On my commute today I listened to an audio book borrowed from one of my kind colleagues: The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, read by Lewis himself (a recording of a radio presentation he did once of a sort of condensed version of the book, as far as I could tell). First of all, if you get a chance to listen to C. S. Lewis' voice sometime, do it! He sounds wonderful. Secondly, listening brought to mind a challenging concept that I encountered a few years ago when I read The Four Loves, Till We Have Faces (a novel by Lewis), and A Severe Mercy, a memoir by Sheldon Vanauken, in close succession. All three books explore the idea of natural loves and divine love (God's love) and how these loves may come in conflict with each other.

The main challenging concept that Lewis presents is this:

Even for their own sakes the loves must submit to be second things if they are to remain the things they want to be. In this yoke lies their true freedom; they are "taller when they bow." For when God rules in a human heart, though He may sometimes have to remove certain of its native authorities altogether, He often continues others in their offices and, by subjecting their authority to His, gives it for the first time a firm basis. (The Four Loves)

Essentially, Lewis argues that all natural loves must be submitted to the higher love of God, that they must in a sense be killed, if they are to be preserved at all and made into something holy.

This subjection of love has to happen in Till We Have Faces as well (warning: spoilers!). The narrator and main character, Orual, suffers the loss of her beloved sister, Psyche, who is "offered" to a god whose existence Orual refuses to accept (the novel's a retelling of the classic myth of Cupid and Psyche). Orual, faced even with strong evidence that the god is there and is good, rather than joining her sister in worship, becomes distant and violently jealous. She fails to submit a natural love of her sister to the ultimate divine love.

In Vanauken's memoir, A Severe Mercy, he tells of his own journey through refusal to submit natural love to God's love and into submission in the end (warning: more spoilers!). When his wife, Davy, becomes a Christian, she begins to devote herself fully to Christ, and Sheldon, much like Orual at first, becomes jealous and cannot find his way to join her in this full devotion and obedience. His love for his wife takes first place in his life, stealing that "throne" in his heart, so to speak, from its rightful owner, Christ.

Both books tell of their main characters' coming to an understanding, as the result of extremely difficult circumstances involving suffering (and even death) of their earthly beloveds, that they must subject their natural loves to the highest love. Orual finally recognizes that through full obedience to the god, her sister has been made "a thousand times more her very self than she had been before the Offering" (Till We Have Faces). Yet still, the ultimate purpose and highest devotion, Orual learns, is to be for the god himself: "if [Psyche] counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake." In Vanauken's case, the literal death of his wife becomes the representation to him of the figurative death that any earthly love must undergo in order to be sanctified, or put in its proper place and thus ultimately exalted, under the authority of God's love. He proclaims near the end of the memoir: "If God saved our love - and, indeed, transformed it into its real and eternal self - in the only way possible, her death, it was for me, despite grief and aloneness, worth it."

And that's the key and the hopeful part of this challenging idea: Even though earthly loves must be subjected (in Luke 14:26 Jesus says we must even "hate" our families and very lives for His sake), ultimately by subjecting them God can transform them into their true selves. The earthly loves can be made even better, fuller, richer, when they are put in their proper places in submission to God.

What does this mean for me? My tendencies lead me to devote much of my attention and affection to my family, my husband, my earthly loves. In and of itself, such devotion is not bad, and God of course commands us to love one another. But my devotion to earthly loves can easily take the place of my devotion and obedience to Christ as the ultimate priority. For instance, when I'm feeling overwhelmed or depressed, I can lean on my husband for support, but ultimately shouldn't I rely fully on Christ for every need? Shouldn't I pray first rather than as an afterthought? Instead of fearing with great dread any time I perceive an earthly good might change or be taken away, shouldn't I acknowledge always that all earthly relationships are gifts from His hand, able to be removed from me? And shouldn't I be willing to accept any such removal without resentment or fear?

This submission is hard (to put it mildly), but I need to remember to cling to Christ alone, who will never fail or change, and to hold openly every earthly love. Hopefully then those earthly loves will be freed to blossom into holy and beautiful loves resting properly in my heart as second things.

Feeling at Home

I recently finished reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L'Engle, called A Circle of Quiet. The book is basically a journal; at least a lot of the writing is taken from L'Engle's personal journals, she explains. While reading any book, I find myself thinking, analyzing, making connections between whatever I'm going through and feeling at the time and what the author is saying, whether through fiction or non-fiction, and in this particular book, thought-provoking ideas abound. My idea for this blog (at least as a starting point) is to take intriguing ideas from reading as leaping-off points and write about my own reflections in response to those ideas.

So, I'll just leap right in! I love the question L'Engle raises after she shares a story about living in a small town and not feeling quite part of the long-standing community there:

But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?

I want to say, "Yeah! Where? Nowhere, really." At least this has been my experience.

Growing up, I used to read every night at bedtime, snuggled into my covers with a cozy pillow and the soft yellow light of a bedside lamp. (I still try to read at bedtime now, but exhaustion often takes over!) The feelings I had during those bedtimes were secure, comfortable, peaceful, at rest, trusting, calm. I've often wondered as an adult where those feelings have gone.

It seems like as children we tend to trust that our parents have things under control and everything will be fine. I don't think these are even conscious thoughts for children - they might just be ingrained, automatic. Then as we get older, of course we gain more and more responsibilities, but we are still at home under our parents' roof. Not too much really changes. For me, life changed most rapidly and drastically after I graduated from college and moved to a new town to start grad school (I had gone to college near my hometown and lived at home for good portions of the time). The day after my college graduation, my parents moved to a new town a good five hour drive from the place I had lived for my whole life up until that point.

Changes: New town, living with my sister and then on my own, new friends, new church, and eventually new (first) full-time job. Perhaps the decision to "move on into the vastness of maturity" had happened, or at least the move had been effected in my life regardless of my choice! There are many questions that one has to ask and actually answer at this point in one's life: Who am I as an adult person? What's my place in the world? How am I defined? These are hard questions to answer.

God's word and prayer, and also many talks with close friends and family, helped me immensely in answering these questions, but I still think L'Engle is right in questioning whether we can ever feel at home in the world once we are aware of the broadness of life, the bigness of the world around us, and the complicated nature of relationships. That feeling of complete security I had as a child at bedtime may not come back in its totality anymore, though I think God grants glimpses of it from time to time.

The most significant way I've seen God grant some feelings of "at home-ness" and stability in my life is through marriage, which I believe is a gift from God that serves many purposes, greatest of which is to show to people a sort of picture of God's kind of unconditional love in a way that is, to a great extent, tangible. Another purpose, I think, may be to show His children a glimpse of the security and feeling of being at home that they can have in His presence both now and ultimately with Him outside of their earthly lifetimes.

The truth is, I don't belong here. Many things in earthly life testify to this truth: I feel despair at the lack of having enough time for valuable things; I am saddened by death, which seems so drastically wrong; I long for something somehow closer.

The longing, the lack of feeling at home, help point to the reality of an eternity beyond this life, and a citizenship in heaven. This verse from Paul's letter to the Philippians is a good encouragement and reminder to me:

For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself. (Philippians 3:20-21)

I am waiting for something different and better, something that cannot be found here and now. The lack of feeling at home in the world reminds me to keep looking forward to my eternal home with the Lord. Then finally those feelings of childhood security will grow again.