Simply Christian, made simpler, a summary of Tom Wright’s great work called Simply Christian
Made for Each Other –chapter 3
Before I summarize this chapter, I have something to say about marriage. I lead a fascinating discussion each semester in my professor friend’s general psychology class at James Madison University. She asks me to come in when they talk about romantic relationships and marriage because of my many years work at a local clinic where I have spoken with hundreds of women about their current romantic relationships. What surprises me every time I go into this JMU class is the answer to the question, “do you want to be married someday?” When I ask for a show of hands, I’ve never had less than 95% raise their hands to a “yes.” Last semester, out of approximately 90 students, I had zero nos. Even the occasional “no” is most times ambivalent—“don’t care either way.” This is truly fascinating to me in an age where marriage is in such trouble and the divorce rate is headed towards 50% of all first marriages and much higher than that for 2nd and 3rd marriages.
This experience at JMU made me say a resounding “YES” to Tom Wright’s thoughts in this chapter that the whole area of romantic relationships forms an echo of a voice from a distant land, similar to the echo of a voice we hear for justice. How do we know that it’s not right for someone innocent to be jailed? Who told us to feel this way? So too, where did the ache for intimacy with another human being come from? Could it be an echo of a voice from another world saying, “hey you, you were made for something more.”
As we all know, we live in a world where many marriages that were “made in heaven sometimes end not far from hell. Although to couples in the first flush of romance the very thought of each other adds a whole glorious new dimension to their lives, statistics suggest that, unless they know how to navigate the road that lies ahead, they may soon be yelling and sobbing and calling the divorce lawyers” (29).
And so we see broken relationships and know about high divorce rates, and yet we still long and hope for that perfect relationship to come along. Wright argues that this very hope and longing is a signpost to another world, an echo of a voice calling to us that says we were made for relationship, that our hopes for intimacy are not made up fantasy but rather proof that things are not as they should be, that things are not as they were originally intended to be.
The Christian view of this voice is that God, who is relational in his very being, has made us relational as well and is calling us to a relationship with him and with others. That’s where the aching for intimacy with another human being comes from. God shares the pain of broken relationships too. One of the claims of Christianity is that “the paradox of laughter and tears” that runs deeply through our best relationships also runs deeply through the heart of God. (38)
And so just as we long for justice and find it so hard to grasp, so too we long for deep relationships and find them to be elusive. These longings tell us that our lives as we experience them here is not all there is, that we were made for more, that there IS more.
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