Early wedding anniversary thoughts

Tomorrow Katie and I celebrate our first seven years of marriage. I feel within the last year especially, my amazement and respect for the union of marriage has experienced a progression of growth to which I would not have understood even a year ago. Indeed, I agree with the council of Trent in viewing marriage a sacramental means of grace. Undoubtedly more than through any other manner, God has chosen to sanctify Katie and I through our marriage to one another, and both this truth and its effectiveness has become more obvious to me every day. I believe that Katie and I would both confess that our times of struggle, though arduous, ultimately build the foundations of our greatest joys. I am so grateful for Katie’s commitment to me and our marriage. Afred Adler, a man I used to study quite frequently, once wrote something that is still written in my heart.

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a “getaway.” We cannot love and be limited.

I am so thankful that seven years ago, Katie was honest in her vows to commit herself to me, giving herself fully and without limit. Such is a rare choice, yet it is powerful. One thing Adler might not have been considering though, was how such an unlimited context avails itself to the workings of the Divine.

I have been continually confronted over the last year with the truth that my love for Katie and God are tethered; they are absolutely inseparable. Christ makes it clear that our greatest call is to love God and our neighbor, both of these finding definition and realization in the other.* Furthermore, he claims that the degree to which the outside world will know that we are His is determined by the extent to which we love. Therefore, there are several implications for this. Confessing love for God or discipleship to Christ while not loving Katie exposes me as a liar and fraud. Yet, if I love Katie, in simply such an action, I testify my love for my God and Savior.

Move from the individual to the corporate and things get more interesting. Our love and submission to one another should point towards that of Christ and the Church. This is a picture not just for Katie and I but also for our community. We then, in loving and submitting to one another, demonstrate to those around us that Christ is Lord and indeed loves His people. Specifically, His love is one that extends to embrace any sacrifice, even that of Himself, and is ultimately focused towards the sanctification and purity of His Church, bringing Her into full relationship with God the Father, only in Whom there is life. Therefore, it is the mission of Christ to bring security, joy, and true life to His people. As such, His people can trust Christ and yield their hearts to Him in everything without fear. Much of this is related to my earlier post concerning the testimony of the Bride.

Having said all this, I now define my own husbandry success as this:
Loving Katie while confessing Christ to the degree that the intersection of such love and confession testifies both to Katie and to our community that God is good, Christ is faithful, and that both true joy and life is only found in yielding to His love.

To state an obvious fact, I am often failing in my love for Katie, just as I do the Godhead. These moments, however, are equally opportunistic, for it is in these moments that Christ, through the Holy Spirit, guides us towards reconciliation through forgiveness. Such is the heart of God; He brings life out of death.

*interestingly similar to the relationship of glorification between the Father and Beloved Son briefly mentioned in my previous post. For instance, Christ too glorifies the Father through His own obedience towards His calling to love the people of God. Whereas God and Christ share in glory, the Church shares in the love of God. As we love God, He empowers us with His love to proceed towards others. There are also Pneumatic implications.

Thoughts from my first Father's Day

Sunday I experienced my first Father's Day. Despite the parody promulgated within society defining this day as one on which basically ties and socks go on sale, I found great meaning in the moment. Specifically, I meditated on a couple different insights and encouragements.

First, I was struck with how, although this day is intended to honor the father, the joy and glory of the father finds referent not in the honoring of his own inherent role and position but in the adoration of his child by others. To say it another way, the pride of myself as a father is not related to any right or position of my own fatherhood; rather, it is inseparably tethered to the personhood of my daughter. This should be an obvious statement; however, it provided an affective picture in my mind to the relationship between God the Father and His beloved Son, specifically related to reflected glorification. Our divine scriptures make it clear that the Son seeks to glorify His Father through obedience to His call, and yet, it is the Father's intent to reflect this glorify back to the Son, Whom the Father will lift up to be worshiped by all. The glory of one is defined and realized through the other.

Secondly, it was a time to reflect a little more on something that has been progressively penetrating my soul - the violent sacrifice of the Son positioned with the lavish love of the creation. As I consider these married contrasts, I find my thinking darting between:

the goodness and divinity of God's creation
the pride and avariciousness of Man's fall

the humility of Christ's incarnation
the authority of Christ in giving up His spirit

the judgmental looks upon the pregnant yet hopeful Virgin
the return of condemning isolation thrust upon the already widowed mother of an executed criminal

the beloved Son
the forsaking Father

the baptism in the Jordan River
the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane

the glory of the resurrected Christ
the hope in the promised future resurrection and recreation

I think about the metanarrative of suffering, love, death, life, sin, and redemption. I wonder in awe at how all of this is held within the divine relation of Father and Child. I recognize that I don't understand the depths of this relationship, nor that of Creator and creation. Still, I am grateful that in experiencing fatherhood, I have greater appreciation and more paused consideration of God as Father. God communicating Himself to man in the redemption story through the relationship of Father and Son is one in which, though absent of full understanding, is replete in grace; in that, it maintains at least a level of common relatedness, of which now I share.

Having said all this, allow me to conclude by diverging to an old prayer:

Almighty God, heavenly Father, you have blessed us with the joy and care of children: Give us calm strength and patient wisdom as we bring them up, that we may teach them to love whatever is just and true and good, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A truth still pondering

Suffering must be approached with joy and patience, for it is necessary for the production of character and the receiving of grace.

Contemplating Innate Desire

Over the last couple of months, I've progressively been meditating on calling, passion, renewal, and obedience. All of which are very much related. I am sure much of my future writing will recall these themes. For the moment, however, allow me to briefly share some thoughts to which I have been ruminating.

Not too long ago at Church of the Incarnation, Father Philputt eloquently spoke about the shift in thinking from our early Christian brethren to those within the modern and contemporary Church. The basic thesis is that the historic Church, I am supposing apostolic through premodern, would largely gather together in prayer and fasting, seeking guidance upon which they would respond in obedience. This obedient response would often necessitate the crucifying of one's own individual wants for the corporate good of the Church and glorification of the Eternal One. Relatively recently in the Christian era, however, followers of Christ have turned this process over on its head. Coming to steam during current times, focus has progressively been put on recognizing one's own innate desire and then praying for God's utilization of it for His glory, realized of course through the ultimate success of personal passion and ambition of self. In both events, one is sought to compromise and limit oneself to the other.
Having said that, let's transition slightly to the idea of perversion. May we begin with a definition:

perversion |pərˈvər zh ən|
noun

the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended

To make something perverse, therefore, is to twist something that was true, or good. Sex. Influence. Money. Talent. All of these things are gifts from God that are all too readily turned inward by the possessor (a more holy context would label as steward) toward gratification of the individual self. Such an action moves even beyond anthropocentrism to egocentrism.

This leads me to reflect upon the object of my heart. To me, I have two options: Christ or myself. I disbelieve it to be anything but the two, for truly looking towards the good of others, outside myself, is only accomplished through the love of Christ. Loving God and our neighbor are strongly related, and neither truly exists without the other. If my passions are directed for the self prescribed good of my own person, then I have perverted what God has given me to be used for His glory. Renewal must be found. If however, my passions are submitted to God, for Him to use mightily or sparingly (of which I must yield and be content with), then I walk in obedience to Him. There, I find fulfillment of my calling.

Perhaps to say it another way, my calling is not to be famous and applauded in this world for reaching a level of success in what I am necessarily inwardly passionate about. My calling is to be obedient to God and faithful to what He commands of me. At times that may call for something of which I happen to desire strongly. Other moments, it might very much be the opposite. Still, it is in faith that I trust God's leading of me and that joy comes from knowing Him. It is in using the innate desires of my heart to His glory that I testify His creative provision implanted within me at my creation. Likewise, it is in the denying of those desires also for His glory that I confess His sufficiency imparted to me through Christ.

I believe Bishop N.T. Wright speaks on these ideas in his popular work Simply Christian. Here he begins with the related topic of sexual ethics.

Christian sexual ethics, in other words, isn't simply a collection of old rules which we are now free to set aside because we know better (the danger with [ancient Epicureanism and more modern Deism]). Nor can we appeal against the New Testament by saying that whatever desires we find inside our deepest selves must be God-given (the natural assumption with [pantheism]). Jesus was quite clear about that. Yes, God knows our deepest desires; but the famous old prayer which (tremblingly) acknowledges that fact doesn't go on to imply that this means they are therefore to be fulfilled and carries out as they stand, but rather that they need cleansing and healing.

Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Another famous old prayer puts it even more sharply:

Almighty God, who alone can bring order to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity: Give your people grace so to love what you command and to desire what you promise that, among the many changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically even in a church, where this prayer has become reversed: where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love and to promise what we already desire. The implicit religion of many people today is simply to discover who they really are an then try to live it out - which is, as many have discovered a recipe for chaotic, disjointed, and dysfunctional humanness. The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And on of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to a new creation, of finding not what we already had but what God was longing to give us. At the heart of the Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.