Hope in Marriage and in the Church

The most powerful image of covenant in the scriptures for me is the image of marriage. Israel, we are told, is like the (often faithless) spouse of God.

A marriage is a relationship that is defined by reciprocal promises, but it isn’t just defined by reciprocal promises. It is also defined by love, passion, and what I think of as habits of affection. We often think of love as a kind of Dionysian force that assaults us, but married love is more than simply Dionysian. It is also agricultural, something that one treasures, cultivates, and seeks to protect. I think it suggestive that in English “husband” can denote both a spouse and a farmer.

-thus Nate Oman.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, my poppets, I was thinking on the same subject this morning. 

One always has little grievances in a marriage.  They can become big grievances with enough energy in thought spend brooding on them.  Successful husbands and wives don’t let these little grievances and niggling irritations stand in the way of the marital embrace.  They give themselves over physically and emotionally to the joyous hug.

Same thing with God and His Church.  Intellectual doubts; emotional doubts; and irritations with Church programs, local leaders, and the community of the Saints–those are always in play.

We all know that faith is the cure for doubts about the gospel.  Do we know that about our marriages?  If we understand what faith is, we do.  Faith is the virtue of continuing a holistic emotional, spiritual, and intellectual commitment even when the feelings have receded and the logic escapes your memory.  Faith says, “I don’t know now, but I knew then, and I choose to be true to who I was then.”  Faith says, “I don’t love with great romance now, but I did then, and I choose to be true to who I was then.”   Faith is a form of integrity between your past and present self; it is a heavenly virtue because that integration of selves smacks of eternity.  Faith is also a form of integrity because it rejects the separation between one’s emotions and actions and thoughts, as in the Parable of the Faithful Husband.

Our covenant relationship with the Church depends on not only mutual fidelity to promises but also on habits of affection and charity.

-Oman again.  Faith knows that what recedes returns.

Which brings us to hope.  Hope is one of the more obscure virtues.  It is either hard to define or else is defined trivially.  But the experience of marriage and church membership point to one clear and non-trivial meaning of hope.

In marriage, I have noticed, you sometimes want to hold on to your irritations.  Your wife blundered but when you task her with it, it turns out to be just some kind of misunderstanding.  Or she says, “I see what you mean.  I’m sorry.”  So sweethearts still?  Not always.  Because the irritation doesn’t want to be smoothed away.  It won’t take yes for an answer.

Sometimes we are talking over some Church issue with a critics in the comments here and it eventually comes out that they just aren’t willing to let go of their criticism, not even to entertain arguments.

Hope is wanting your irritations to be smoothed away.  Hope is the willingness to believe.  It may seem unimportant as an intellectual definition, but it bulks pretty big in the inner world of the soul.

Hope is desire, and is one of the great virtues.  In both religion and marriage, hope precedes faith.