Chapter 48: Love Is Action
LOVE IS ACTION
THE summer solstice has just passed, and the days are long and sunny and clear. It is evening, and hardly a ripple moves on the harbor. The slate blue of the darkening sky is reflected in the slate blue water. The boats lying at anchor are struck full gold with the setting sun, and Morris Island across the harbor is velvet green-gold in the late light, standing against the twilight. A white seagull floats quietly on the surface of the dark water near the shore. The honeysuckle makes the air sweet with the gift of its perfume. A small boat comes in from the sea, “snipping through the water like a pair of scissors.”
I have only a few more days in this lovely place. You are in Oxford now, beautiful old Oxford with its narrow streets, its bells, its green and flowered closes, its libraries and chapels and halls. But I picture you here with me, sitting in the cottage by the fireplace, talking. On the mantel are a black wooden decoy, a brown pottery jug of winter grasses, a copper bowl, and a row of books which are my great temptation when I am trying to write. MacDuff lies just outside the back door, on the cool brick of the patio, his hind paws stretched out behind, bottoms up, like little rubbery flowers, his black shiny nose resting between his two front paws, ears alert.
We would talk about the fourth thing —love. It is not fourth in priority. I have not arranged these in order of importance because, quite simply, I don’t know how. The ideal marriage, I think, cannot do without any one of them. There must be acceptance of the hierarchical order: there must be sex, there must be loyalty and pride, and there must be, in and through all, love.
You have fallen in love. You’ve had the experience nearly everyone dreams of, that the poets have written about, that happens to some “at first sight,” to others slowly, and to you, I think, after a very short acquaintance. I remember the first time it happened to me. I realized it had happened when I looked in the mirror, for I saw a different person there. “You love him,” I said to the face, and the face answered yes. You look at his face and everything in you says yes. You know, beyond any doubting, that this is the man you could gladly give yourself to. Your heart sings, the whole world sings, the look of things is transformed.
But that is not the love of which I want to speak now. The kind of love that makes a marriage work is far more than feelings. Feelings are the least dependable things in the world. To build a marriage on that would be to build a house on sand. When you promise, in the wedding ceremony, to love, you are not promising how you expect to feel. You are promising a course of action which begins on your wedding day and goes on as long as you both live.
Your feelings cannot help but be affected by riches and poverty, health and sickness, and all the other circumstances which make up a lifetime. Your feelings will come and go, rise and fall, but you make no vows about them. When you find yourself, like the unstable man in the Epistle of James, “driven with wind and tossed,” it is a great thing then to know that you have an anchor. You have made a promise before God to love. You promise to love, comfort, honor, and keep this man. You vow to take him as your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish “according to God’s holy ordinance,” till death parts you.
Not one of us can fully face up to all the details of the possibilities at the time we make these staggering promises. We make them in faith. Faith that the God who ordained that a man and woman should cleave together for a lifetime is the God who alone can make such faithful cleaving possible. We are not given grace for imaginations. We are given the grace needed at the time when it is needed, “this day our daily bread.” And because you have given your word you have committed yourself once and for all. “This, by the grace of God, I will do.” Nothing that has ever been worth doing has been accomplished solely through feelings. It takes action. It takes putting one foot in front of the other, walking the path you have agreed together to walk.
The underlying principle of love is self-giving. It seems to me that this is inevitable for a woman who truly loves. You already know how deeply, how urgently you long to give yourself to your husband. It is the essence of femininity to give. Perhaps it is more difficult for a man to give himself, but both husband and wife must learn this. In the wife, this takes the form of submission. Paul never needed to command wives to love. Apparently he thought they would do that without his admonition. But he reminded them that their love was to take the form of submission. When in the course of daily life the love which they so naturally feel for their husbands is not sufficient for the wear and tear, the action then required is submission.
But Paul knew that a man’s love was of a different sort. His virile drive for domination, God-given and necessary in fulfilling his particular masculine responsibility to rule, renders it more difficult for him to lay down his life. So Paul imposed the heaviest burden on the man when he commanded him to love his wife as Christ loved the Church.
You wives must learn to adapt yourselves to your husbands, as you submit yourselves to the Lord, for the husband is the ‘head’ of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the Church and savior of his body. The willing subjection of the Church to Christ should be reproduced in the submission of wives to their husbands. But, remember, this means that the husband must give his wife the same sort of love that Christ gave to the Church, when he sacrificed himself for her. Christ gave himself to make her holy, having cleansed her through the baptism of his Word —to make her an altogether glorious Church in his eyes. She is to be free from spots, wrinkles or any other disfigurement —a Church holy and perfect.
Men ought to give their wives the love they naturally have for their own bodies. The love a man gives his wife is the extending of his love for himself to enfold her.
In practice what I have said amounts to this: let everyone of you who is a husband love his wife as he loves himself, and let the wife reverence her husband.