Testament, Volume 14 #5

Commitment, Desire and Physical Love

Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

--Mark 10:9

Divorce is everywhere, claiming almost half the marriages in our time. Some think that divorce now threatens the very structure of our society. The answer lies in finding better approaches to marriage rather than in condemning those who divorce. But whatever approach is taken, it will have to think out how we make commitments today.

By commitment we mean promise, pledge, dedication. We mean loyalty, follow-through to a path taken, a word that is given. Commitment is sometimes expressed in words, sometimes sealed with a contract--or in religious life, with a sacrament. A commitment is the very opposite of a one-night stand, or a promise easily broken, or a task undertaken without integrity. Permanent commitments seem out of style in our mobile society, which is sometimes described as protean--meaning that people take many roles and try to lead many lives.

But God (if we interpret God's thinking through the Church) is all for long-range or permanent commitment. The covenant God makes with Israel, as well as the one we renew with Christ in every Eucharist, is not a matter of convenience. A baptismal commitment is not for ten years, or as long as we have a Latin Mass. Baptism is a commitment made to the faith community and vice versa--and to Jesus as the Lord. A marriage commitment is not made for five years, or until one partner gets sick or loses a job. The covenant is ringingly proclaimed "until death do you part." The whole idea of commitment seems imperilled today. There is even a wry humour about it. Several years ago a New Yorker cartoon showed a suburban house with a realtor's sign outside saying, "For Sale--ideal for a first marriage."

Nevertheless, ideals die hard, thank God. Love, marriage and family are still among our highest values. But we have such strange ideas about them. Perhaps we are startled to discover that the Bible speaks so frankly of human love. There are many kinds of love, but the references in the Scriptures often are to eros or sexual love, to the act between a man and a woman we even call "making love," the act that bonds two people and creates us. We may be startled, but the biblical authors are not indelicate in writing as they did, nor is Jesus in quoting them. It is not wrong to speak of the body, or of two in one flesh. It would be dangerous not to speak thus--to give the impression that love has no connection with bodily things. As one of the early Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria, said, "We should not be ashamed to name that which God was not ashamed to create." And Tertullian added, "Nature should be the subject, not of shame, but of respect."

So how can one speak in praise of the body? Easy--it is me--the way God made me, and all God's works are good. There is no such thing as a human person without the body. Even the new life God promised me beyond death is not the life of a soul roaming around, but the continuation of my personality integrated with a new kind of body, which means the form or symbol by which I continue to be myself.

It is important for us to understand the body both as the medium of love and, at the same time, its limitation.We begin as creatures of desire. We desire to love and be loved. Desire. Love in the flesh. Love not of woman, but of this woman; not of man but of this man. It is the marvellous stuff of poetry and of life. And yet, we have to say more. Sexual love should be understood as a very great gift--indeed a paradigm, or master model, of the way God loves us. And at the same time it will fail us, because it points further, to a love beyond all flesh that only God who is Spirit can satisfy.

When we say so much that is positive about sexual love and then add that it is limited, we do this not to be spoilsports but to ponder the truth of what we are. Simone Weil wrote, "What makes physical desire so powerful in you is not a physical thing. It is powerful because you make it the vehicle of that which is most essential in you: the need for union, the need for God." St. Teresa of Avila put it simply: "There is no remedy for our desire." She could have added: no remedy on earth, no remedy in the flesh, no remedy short of eternal life. And Paul Claudel has one of his heroines, immensely lovable herself, declare, "I am the promise that cannot be kept."

That is the promise of total happiness. Only the naïve and the romantic think that this lies ahead for a newly married couple. What everyone hopes for them is happiness, at times very great. What also lies ahead is the cross. It is not that marriage is the cross. Life is. Discipleship is. Following Jesus is. But so is hope and, in the end, resurrection.