“They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”
C.S. Lewis
Today is Valentine’s Day, a day focused on all that can be described as romantic love. In the quote above, C.S. Lewis writes of something deeper, a “quieter love enables them to keep the promise.”
Most of us remember those initial thoughts of “being in love”, right? And I also think most of us would agree that the love that grows through the years still contains those romantic feelings, but that deeper feeling is linked to our commitment to one another. It is this kind of love that Jesus responded to when questioned on the topic of divorce –
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Matthew 19:3-6
Too often in our culture, we simply ignore this passage of Scripture in so many ways. From divorce to all kinds of sexual immorality, we have exchanged God’s best for something that is fleeting and is so much less than what was intended for a man and woman joined together by God.
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