"The Four Loves"

In this wonderful book, Lewis discusses a lot about love and the truth about it. For example, he uses Eros to represent the sexual aspect of a relationship, and that with Eros alone, a relationship will not last. In his summary of the reading, he uses the analogy of diving into a swimming pool. Eros is the diving, but if they cannot swim, there will be no chance for the relationship to last. Instead, they must get out of the pool and try to dive into another one. Because of this, it is very important to work hard to keep love alive. Lewis uses an illustration that I really like, of a garden as a picture of a couple who are in love. The garden is beautiful - beautiful to look at, incredible to smell, but in order to keep it like that it takes a lot of work to keep out the weeds that could very quickly destroy the entire garden. "[A] garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined". This is the stunningly beautiful and divine garden which Lewis talks about. Love, and all of it's components are unexplainably magnificent if tended to and treated in the right way, with care.

One of these components of a Christian relationship or marriage that I want to talk a little about is the idea of the wife being submissive. The word "submissive" is something I think we need to be very very careful with - even as Christians, but also with unbelievers. I noticed that, even in class yesterday when submission was mentioned, everyone started to laugh. Why was this so funny? To me, it's a serious thing that should be treated with very careful attention because it is something that can very easily be abused if you do not follow exactly what the word means. Before even mentioning that the wife should submit, I think we should establish the job of the husband first. In Ephesians 5 it commands "Husbands [to] love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy...[i]n the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself". Now this is a big statement. Love your wife like Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her? It is only after this is in place that a wife can submit to her husband. Also, note that this does not mean that a husband has the right to make every decision in the family, for how can that be love? Love is working together and collaborating in order to make a decision. I see it as a leadership role for the husband, and not a dictatorship role. Lewis even specifically points out that "[i]t is submitted rather than asserted", showing that there is nothing that is 'forced', but everything is out of pure love. This is something that can only be explained to a certain extent because even near the end of the chapter in Ephesians it says that "this is a profound mystery". Indeed, it is a mystery and the relationship between a man and wife is best explained by seeing the evidence, seeing it is action.

I feel that part of the reason for a lot of male dominance in our society is due to that simple word 'submit'. It has been abused far too much and has been accepted as a whole different meaning from what God intended it to be. This is why I think it is not something to joke about, but rather something to be cautiously addressed, with careful attention being payed to the true meaning. When this is accomplished, only then will it help the garden of love to flourish.