Findings

If man tries to find everything in a man-woman or a friend-to-friend relationship, he destroys the very thing he wants and destroys the ones he loves. He sucks them dry, he eats them up, and they as well as the relationship are destroyed. But as Christians we do not have to do that. Our sufficiency of relationship is in that which God made it to be, in the infinite-personal God, on the basis of the work of Christ in communication and love. (True Spirituality 142)

Schaeffer is suggesting that the only comfortable place — place of absolute fulfillment of the relational appetite – is in close relationship with God. Being in that place frees human relationships from an intolerable burden. Yet I see the tendency to expect too much of marriage… to never be satisfied, and to relentlessly try to change others to make a comfortable place in the world. It’s the natural way of seeing things if I’m at the center of the universe. But I believe God is at the center. I’m in orbit around him, and others orbit on the same plane as fellow creatures. 

This enables me to say — and once in awhile I do, and someday it will be a habit at last — “We are so different. We are different in huge, important ways. Aims. Dreams. Thank God for him. Thank God for the beauty of being in a marriage relationship with someone so utterly different. I accept him. I accept his differences. I am thankful for him as my companion.”

There’s no gender in God; there’s no maleness or femaleness in God. Whatever is in the maleness that’s different from the femaleness, and whatever’s in the femaleness that’s different from the maleness — whatever that is it’s all in Him but it’s not separated into male and female. That’s down here, for you and me.

This excerpt from a sermon by Dennis Kinlaw is part of his discussion of the church, which includes males and females, as “the bride of Christ.” To me his comments raise the stakes for marriage. “Gender roles,” Mars and Venus, specialized vocabularies in the name of “good communication skills…” All these seem devised to help us equitably demarcate our separate incompleteness as males or females. What place does any of that have in drawing us together “in Christ”?

One of the parts I liked in The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s discussion of that word “in” in scripture. ”This word, again and again in the New Testament, is used in senses we cannot fully understand,” Lewis writes.

That we can die ‘in’ Adam and live ‘in’ Christ seems to me to imply that man, as he really is, differs a good deal from man as our categories of thought and our three-dimensional imaginations represent him; that the separateness — modified only by causal relations — which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality, by some kind of ‘inter-animation’ of which we have no conception at all.

The separateness between male and female would count as one of the illusions that’s corrected in Lewis’s “absolute reality.” When we’re faced with one of those formidable gender chasms, instead of persisting in the attempt to bridge it and meet somewhere in the middle, this notion arises of a Third Party that draws both expressions of humanity into Itself. (If God is both male and female, I have no clue what the proper pronoun is!) There are aspects of God I won’t ever know if I’m preoccupied with the differences between the sexes. But the alternative, when we enact self-surrender instead of self-will, is nothing short of the kind of unity the Creation knew before the Fall.

Here’s one more passage from Kinlaw (This Day With the Master) that relates to the rest of this inconclusive jumble:

The clothing that Yahweh made for Adam and Eve after they sinned is analogous to the veil in the temple that divided the holy place from the Holy of Holies. Neither was there simply to cover up that which was beautiful; rather, each existed to protect the beautiful from defilement. Adam and Eve needed clothing only when love had turned into lust and they began to see each other as distinct objects to be used. The garments were not to cause separation; they were to protect from the results of the separation caused by sin. The curtain in the temple was not to separate the people from Yahweh, but to protect them from thinking that they had found him and could control him.

All of these link the marriage relationship with the relationship between humanity and God. All of them suggest that separateness is not our true state, not the state we were made for, but a result of distorted perspective when we’re “in” sin. I suppose in practical terms it means the healthiest reponse we can have when we feel isolated from either each other or God is to accept it, and pray for grace to accept it with love… We might find ourselves at peace in ways we don’t expect.