Mere Chrisitianity (cont) - 'The Thrill is Gone'

But the reality is that marriages do break down, the marriage loses the thrill it once had. The couple believe they're are no longer in love, they made a mistake and they are entitled to call it quits. But how do we know what love is, and thereby when we aren't 'in love'? Is it because we have been in love before and so when we are not in love we know or do we know because of what our friends have told us. For many neither is the case. Our understanding of love is 'coloured' by what we see in magazine, what we read in books, watch on tv or at the cinema. From the media we learn that when we have made the right choice and we get married we are always in love, there is an excitement and energy. So when we are not in love we know, it must have been a mistake so we leave. In time many of us find a new love with whom we 'fall in love' and the thrill returns but before long that thrill will go.

In marriage, as in every aspect of life, there is thrill at the beginning but it doesn't last. Think of when you go on holiday and you fall in love with the destination and think what a thrill it would be to live there, when you move there the thrill is short lived and in its place there is a 'quieter and more lasting kind of interest'. Lewis suggests that in marriage we should also realise that the initial thrill is only for a time and that if we submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest there will most likely be new thrills in some quite different direction. Allow the initial thrill run its natural course and die away; go on through that 'period of death' into the time of quieter interest and happiness that follows and you will find that you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. Lewis warns against trying to make thrill your regular diet or trying to prolong the thrill artificially. In time they will get weaker and weaker and fewer and fewer and you'll get bored and disillusioned.

Mere Christianity (cont)

I found Lewis' chapter on marriage 'lovely'. A couple of chapters prior to this one Lewis says that great moral teachers don't acutally instruct their followers in anything new but they remind their followers of those things that they already know and which often get lost in the fog of life. So in this chapter Lewis reminded me that God intended marriage to be a 'single organism' (one flesh). In stating this God was not expressing a sentiment but a fact. A fact that can be equated to a lock and key, a violin and a bow - a violin is not a violin without its bow! Our inventor - God- made something that consisted of two parts. This union is complex. One aspect of this union is sexual but you cannot isolate this aspect from the whole and still gain the benefit of the whole. Just like you cannot get the full benefit of eating by just putting food in your mouth and not chewing, or tasting food and then spitting it out.

However it is this thing called love why so many people in the world get married and it is whilst 'in love' that promises to be true are made. Though made whilst in love the promise was made to be true even when love ceased. Lewis says of this

A promise must be about things I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He may as well promise never to have a headache, or to always feel hungry

Being 'in love' may cease but this does not mean we should cease to love. Love goes beyond feeling,

"...it is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthned by habit -reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both ask for and recieve from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if allowed, 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 should run."