Into the Wardrobe

Hello,

I remember reading this insightful and, at first, astonishing, comment CS Lewis wrote about MARRIAGE in The Four Loves.

Lewis was talking about man being given the role of head of the family but how it isn't the glam job we make it out to be.

Lewis compared a husband's love for his wife with Christ's love for the church, and all its imperfections and weaknesses. It's really a good quote. A paragraph or so, I think.

I'd like to send it to a friend who just got engaged. Why am I sending him a quote about marrying an imperfect woman? Well, ... I could tell you but then I'd be gossipping!

Would anyone be able to post the quote here? I have misplaced my Four Loves book. :(

Thanks!

Moogs

Hey Moogs! Here ya go:

"... the Christian law has crowned [man] in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing - or should I say, inflicting? - a certain "headship" on him. This is a very different coronation. And as we could easily take the natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery not seriously enough. Christian writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken of the husband's headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church - read on - and gave his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud or fanatical lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears."

The chapter on "Christian Marriage" in Mere Christianity also has something about the headship of the husband.