Aug
17
2011
Love the One You’re With
After C. S. Lewis lost his wife, Helen, to cancer, he realized he didn’t have a single good picture of her. Maybe that’s hard to grasp in our culture of profile pics from every angle, but he wasn’t upset about it. In fact, he saw the distinct advantage of lacking a quality image of his wife. He wrote:
I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.
How could a photo of the woman he loved become a snare? Because in the absence of the real person, he saw his tendency to fill the image with his own fancy. In fact, this was one of the prominent themes for Lewis in A Grief Observed. He was terrified at the prospect of shaping Helen into a phantom of his own making. Particularly alarming was his inclination to long for certain aspects of Helen’s personality more than others. Of course he would never intentionally import something fictitious about her, but, he mused, “won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?” What worried Lewis most was that Helen would become to him merely an extension of himself, of his old bachelor pipe-dreams.
Spousal Resistance
Lewis illuminates an overlooked gift in marriage: spousal resistance. I am not talking about red-faced tension or caustic defiance. I mean the simple fact that your spouse is a real person whose very existence will not conform to the image you have of him or her. Spousal resistance anchors you to reality, a reality in which God calls you to love your actual spouse, not your preferred one. Lewis observed:
All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.
And, I would argue, when she is alive, too. As odd as it sounds, we can be thankful for the thousands of little disagreements that season the marital relationship, the countless differences of perspective that make it alive. These indicate that you are interacting with an independent being, one you’ve been entrusted with to love sacrificially.
The Original and Best
The very essence of sacrificial love is accommodating another rather than expecting another to accommodate self. Taking Lewis’s insight, then, we should be suspicious of our tendency to admire only those characteristics we approve of in our spouse and to revise those we don’t. When remembering a deceased spouse, this is bad enough; you aren’t loving her, but an edited memory of her. When serving a living spouse, it is worse; you aren’t pursuing her, but what you hope she would be. Far better is to love the original, not your revised edition. After all, you’re an original, too.
Loving the original requires lifelong adjustment on your part, and this deference is a key proof of the marital love that Christians are called to (Eph. 5:21-33). Don’t be discouraged when you don’t see eye-to-eye with your spouse. Where there is no disagreement, no annoyance, no resistance, there is no opportunity for sacrifice. If we love only what is pleasing to us in our spouse, we are loving only our preferences. We don’t need the gospel to do that.
We do need it to free us from our tendency to adjust one another constantly to our liking. Jesus came to serve an impulsive Peter, a distracted Martha, a dubious Thomas. And he came to serve a silly person like each one of us. And yes, Christ’s redemptive love changes us by degree, but this change is about conformity to righteousness, not conformity to personal preference.
So if your wife laughs too easily for your taste, love her for it. If she’s more pessimistic than you prefer, minister to her fears. If your husband is quieter in social gatherings than you’d like, be grateful for it. If he has more difficulty making plans than you think reasonable, come alongside happily. In all the little spousal resistances, celebrate the privilege of loving a person, not an image.
As Lewis said, reality is iconoclastic. And thank God this is especially true in marriage.
29 Comments
What a great word of encouragement for married people! Even those who are not yet married need this perspective. I will pass it on to others. In a world full of distorted ideals and misguided expectations wrapped in pervasive cultural discontentment, this is the marital prescription the doctor should be giving. Many thanks!
[...] Check it out: Love the One You’re With. [...]
Could we apply this same principle (maybe to a different degree) to our relationships with people in the church?
Yes! Thank you for sharing. What a reminder that we often miss the most significant, rich gift that marriage has to offer (experiencing the freedom found from dying to one's self and living to love another) because we're trying to manipulate what we think we want the other to be. And yes, I do think we can apply this same principle to all relationships. Marriage is perhaps the most rigorous of training grounds, yet the lessons learned there become invaluable when in they are lived out in context with others.
http://greenertrees.blogspot.com/2011/06/im-both.html
Great words. Cherish the person you have with you first and foremost. I still want my wife to not only cherish me wth all my faults but also encourage me to do better but I know the main point. I just recently read a Grief Observed. i am chaplain and it was not what I expected. I was always told it was the anti- Problem of Pain. But it really is not. It is a little but he still is very philosophical in his grief. For me it wa not raw enough. It seemed Lewis feared true sentimentality and emotion. But I am not cutting it or hm down. Everyone grieves differently.
But anyways my mom died while still young and what I have found interesting is that the things I miss the most are things that frustrated me when she was alive. Kind of funny and ironic
Great Post..
Never married so it has take me a while to appreciate these things.
I have sent links to my married friends.
The passive part of loving neighbors and self is the important part. The active part is dependant on this affection and on Providence. Favorite verses on love of neighbors:
(Gen 50:20 NKJ) 20 "But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.
(Mar 11:25 NKJ) 25 "And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.
Good article.
His wife's name was Joy, not Helen.
Actually her name was Helen Joy Davidman.
Major Lewis aficionado and until today had no idea her name was really "Helen." Wow.
[...] quotes from this article: Love the One You’re With by Jeremy Pierre. Spousal resistance anchors you to reality, a reality in which God calls you to [...]
Wow. It's remarkable how the Holy Spirit times articles like this. Yesterday a friend and I were talking about the realities of marriage as it changes over the years. We reminded eachother that "this is not the man I married" was a lie. The man we married then may have different characteristics, trials or temptations. But he's still the man God has called us to love and serve today, just as he is.
I appreciate the Holy Spirit doubling-down on this point to me this afternoon. Thanks.
This is incredible. I have never read anything stated in this way. It has revealed my heart, exposed some sin and I am thankful for it and the changes that are to come in my thinking and actions. Thank you for sharing this.
[...] Love the One You’re With – The Gospel Coalition Blog [...]
Even as a single person, I soooo agree with this. In our image-saturated culture of Facebook, Flickr, and other social networks that emphasize the two-dimensional and the "look," we find it hard to imagine how God could have been serious with the second commandment not to make an image of anything at all. We struggle to understand non-visual cultures like Judaism and Islam, and even the early Reformed tradition with its iconoclasm. However, it is all too easy for us to go from liking an image, to falling in love with what is only a partial representation, to bowing down and worshipping it - coveting and lusting for people and things not our own, projecting onto those images all our ideals (or perhaps our Shadow), and all kinds of other iniquities against the Creator who warned us about this tendency thousands of years ago. Since digital cameras have made the creation and publication of images so easy and so cheap, we've misused this capability all too often, and ended up worshipping the creature instead of the Creator.
Maybe we could take a cue from some Native American cultures, who believe that the camera "steals the soul." The destructiveness of our images is nothing less than tragic. Problems like pornography and exploitative advertising wouldn't be an issue for people in our churches if we took the second commandment more seriously. Much of the pain in this world is about the images we create and the ways that we respond to them, the worship we direct to these images that rightfully belongs to God alone. God help us all!
As my Grandma said,"If two people agree on EVERYthing, then one of them is not necessary."
[...] How could C.S. Lewis consider a photo of his deceased wife to be a snare? He was terrified at the prospect of shaping Helen into a phantom of his own making. Particularly alarming was his inclination to long for certain aspects of Helen’s personality more than others. Of course he would never intentionally import something fictitious about her, but, he mused, “won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?” What worried Lewis most was that Helen would become to him merely an extension of himself, of his old bachelor pipe-dreams. [...]
Thank you for this!
I appreciate this reminder to love my wife for the 3-D person she is, not some re-creation in my mind.
One might could get the impression that we are not supposed to feel any disappointment related to the relationship. It is part of life on this fallen planet that we will have unfulfilled longings and we will experience disappointment in the failings of our spouses. It's a valid feeling. It reminds us that we are thirsty for something more than another person: we are thirsty for the living water, and we are homesick for heaven.
Thanks for the encouragement and the challenge. I needed that today.
[...] Pierre, taking his cue from C.S. Lewis, encourages us to Love the One You’re With. I especially found Lewis’ comment that reality is iconoclastic a helpful antidote to the [...]
[...] Love the One You’re With. This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. ← Breaking free from bondage [...]
[...] View the original article here Related Posts:No Related Posts [...]
This is a great article. Makes you think. Too many limit Christ to a picture too. There is so much more to Christ than a picture, although he was 100% a man, yet God, so that aspect is one that no man has or ever will have. The depth of C.S. Lewis - in this case unveiling his honest grief and also his quest to understand it in light of truth and eternity is astounding.
There is some wisdom in C. S. Lewis's view here. Idolatry is such a pernicious vice when it comes to people we love. However, I would argue that the danger isn't in holding them too high, but God not high enough. True, we must love them now in their sin and corruptions, but God will ultimately perfect our loved ones. And since the blood of His son is the down payment of our perfection, I suspect we ought to see them as He does--washed and clothed in the robes of His righteousness. Loving them and thinking of them not only in terms of the grace God has given them in this life, but also the perfection they will receive in glory.
Lewis is one of my absolute favorite authors. But this time I think I sympathize more with Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote, "To love someone means to see him as God intended him."
I love that, Emily! It reminds me of what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:16, "From now on we regard no one from a human point of view..."
[...] On marriage. Just [...]
[...] can harm our way of life through unrealistic expectations. Jerry Pierre writes a post, “Love the One You’re With“, concerning CS Lewis’ conviction that to have a photograph of his deceased wife Helen [...]
[...] took me a while to read through this blogpost by Jeremy Pierre over at The Gospel Coalition Blog- not because of its length, but because of the [...]