Saturday, October 5, 2024 | Trey Comstock
What a triumph for him, as she often thought, could he know that the proposals which she had proudly spurned only four months ago, would now have been most gladly and gratefully received! He was as generous, she doubted not, as the most generous of his sex; but while he was mortal, there must be a triumph.
She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 50)
Here, deep into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it all clicks into place for our dear, Elizabeth Bennet. She spent the whole book, up until this moment, believing the worst of Mr. Darcy, being prejudiced. Yet, slowly, reality wears down her preconceived notions. She visits his house, which demonstrates both grandeur and sensibility in equal measure. Darcy’s housekeeper, sister, and cousin paint a picture of a deeply loving and kind man, who will go to absurd measures to care for the people that he loves. Darcy, then, deploys that degree of care for Elizabeth’s wayward sister, Lydia, entrap in the embrace of Darcy’s father’s ward, Mr. Wickham. Ever the master of dramatic irony, Austen portrays Elizabeth in despair at all of this. She now knows the wonders of Mr. Darcy, yet through the combined weight of her previous rejection of Darcy and Lydia’s indiscretion with Wickman, Elizabeth believes that Darcy’s goodness sits well beyond her reach. She marvels at him and regrets his seeming inaccessibility.
Scripture often deploys romantic attachment as one of the ways to reflect on the divine-human relationship. In the New Testament, the Letter to the Ephesians, in teaching on marriage, presents Christ as groom and the Church as bride. In the Old Testament, we have an entire, highly erotic, love poem, Song of Songs or Song Solomon, analogizing the love between God and God’s people through many nature based sexual innuendos.
How fair and pleasant you are,
O loved one, delectable maiden!
You are stately as a palm tree,
and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
and lay hold of its branches.
O may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and the scent of your breath like apples,
and your kisses like the best wine
that goes down smoothly,
gliding over lips and teeth.
I am my beloved’s,
and his desire is for me.
Come, my beloved,
let us go forth into the fields,
and lodge in the villages;
let us go out early to the vineyards,
and see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
and the pomegranates are in bloom.
There I will give you my love.
The mandrakes give forth fragrance,
and over our doors are all choice fruits,
new as well as old,
which I have laid up for you, O my beloved.
(Song of Songs 7:6:13 NRSV)
Given the faith’s general prudishness and the presence of small children, we don’t preach much on this text, but just about every pew Bible in just about every church contains it. Song of Songs can remind us of the expanded pallet that we have to work with in understanding how we relate to God.
So, it’s not as weird as you might think that I hear Elizabeth Bennet’s pining for the now fully revealed Darcy in Hebrews 2’s quotation of Psalm 8.
Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. But someone has testified somewhere,
‘What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honour,
subjecting all things under their feet.’
(Hebrews 2:5-8 NRSV)
God has demonstrated profound care for humanity, and I can never stress enough how crazy that should feel. The perfect and all-powerful creator leverages the most powerful forces in the universe to care for us – an imperfect, sin-prone mess. This expression of that thoughts feels like a romantic confession to me. It echoes a lover feeling so inadequate in the face of the perfection of their love, and, unlike Elizabeth Bennet, knowing that they receive love from their beyond perfect lover.
Our art and fiction portray romance as a special category of love. We show wars fought, destinies altered, and lives unended all for the sake of one’s lover. For millennia, our creative output has pondered the depth of love and its associated passion. Texts like Song of Songs, Psalm 8, and Hebrews 2 frame God’s love of us with at least that must passion. God willingly rends asunder God’s perfect peace and tranquility to love us, and even in our constant inconstancy, willingly sacrifices anything for our sake.
Do we even begin to reciprocate?
Do we sit, like Elizabeth Bennet or the author of Psalm 8, and marvel at the wonders of the lover who loves us?
God bent the universe and opened God’s self up to unending disappointment for love of us. Growing up in a very mainline denomination and in a very mainline looking church, few of the people around me showed any reciprocal passion for God. In terms of priorities, God fit somewhere between work, family, and golf (or other suitably upper middle-class pursuit). We knew that God loved us, forgave us, and helped us. In exchange, we should believe, be nice, do good things, stay school, don’t do drugs, vote Republican, enter a suitably responsible career path, and don’t have sex until you get married. Life altering passion hardly entered the picture.
To me, this was the biggest disconnect between the church world that I grew up in and the people that I read about in the Bible. In both testaments, people go to the ends of the earth, risk death, or forever shift their way of living because of an encounter with God. They meet God’s passion with as much passion as they can muster. They recognize the magnitude of love and perfection that has chosen to be mindful of them and let that upend their lives. That sits at the core of Biblical living.
We, then, should live more Biblically – marveling at our amazing lover and seeking to live with reciprocal passion.