Okay, I got about a page into this when my computer went out so let's try this again. Today in Sunday school, we were talking about Matthew and the Beatitudes, specifically about marriage and God's/the Biblical view on marriage and divorce. I just finished reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and he had such a great way of expressing his view on marriage as he sees it from the Bible. I can't do him justice in my own words so I will be quoting him a lot.
Since marriage is a vow made between two people and God, that the two will always be together forever, til death do us part. His first comment on it is that the the two must enter into marriage believing in permanent marriage. "If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another: unchastity is not improved by adding perjury." Here I think he is just talking about not taking marriage casually, but taking it seriously with the intent to stay married.
His next point is about staying married. "The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all." "A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry." He then goes on to answer the question as to why does God want to keep two people together that may no longer be in love. He states a couple of practical reasons, children, and to protect the wife who may have given up her career, but he goes much deeper. Quoting Lewis "They (we) like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst." "Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but still a feeling. No feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even last at all." I have to laugh when he goes on to say that living for 50 years in the same euphoria of initial love would be unbearable. "What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other" "Being in love first moved them to promise fidelity; this quieter love enables them to keep the promise."
"People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change - not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one." "...it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction." "..one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies." "It is because so few understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them."
Well that's what I highlighted in that chapter about marriage in Mere Christianity. I had never heard things put quite that way, so I got a new perspective. Like the Bible, Lewis's view has a high standard for us sinning humans, but although we are sinners and continue to fail, C.S. Lewis said it best by saying "The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection." It's the effort, not the result that is important to God.
You gotta read this book.
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