Feature
Of Brides & Men
Heroic Service Is More Accessible to Christian Men than Nuptial Imagery
I often think that certain aspects of living, thinking, and feeling as a Christian come more easily to women than to men. I have in mind particularly the mysterious but very firmly declared masculinity of God as Father, and the specific and inarguable fact that Jesus came to us as a male human being, and the combination of these with the impassioned and intimate language in which our relationship to God is often portrayed.
Most of all I have in mind the spousal imagery that is central to our thinking about Jesus. When I say "thinking," I don't mean theologizing, or not that only—I mean the place of the Bridegroom in the very language of the apostles and its continuance through two thousand years of reflection and devotion.
Natural for Women
I said spousal imagery, but I'll be more direct: it's specifically nuptial, and therefore erotic, always implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as in the devotional use of the Song of Songs. And that presents a -significant obstacle to me, and I would suppose for many other men as well. A woman can easily imagine, can probably not even without effort avoid imagining, herself as the bride in this wedding, and even in the wedding night. Surely no man who has lived for a while and paid attention to women can be unaware that the thought of being a bride is enormously attractive, powerful, and important to the feminine soul. The details of the expectations involved may vary among times and places, but thoughts of being chosen (not least for her beauty, which is also a way of saying for herself), cherished, protected, and provided for seem to be involved.
If you doubt the enduring significance of those latter two items, protection and provision, modern conditions having made them less essential in the practical sphere, consider the intensity and persistence of women's fascination with Pride and Prejudice, not to mention its many relatives, which descend from the sentimental to the pornographic. Consider, for instance, the popularity of a recent book and movie in which a woman makes herself the sex slave of a billionaire: there is a reason why the object of the female romantic fantasy is so often a rich and powerful man. And though it may seem flippant to put it this way, no one is richer and more powerful than God. Feminists can fight the allure of the wedding, seen as fulfillment, or a necessary step toward fulfillment, only with anger and cynicism.
An Obstacle for Men
None of this is available to men, or at least not in the same way, or at least not to me; perhaps I should confine myself to my own testimony on this matter and let the male reader judge and speak for himself. At any rate, I don't see how any man can see himself as a bride. The thought is at best ridiculous and at worst perverse. I can only make use of this imagery by telling myself to think of the traditional image of the soul as feminine, to remind myself of C. S. Lewis's observation that we are all feminine in relation to God, and so on.
But these tactics are not really of great use. To start with, there is the basic problem suggested by the conscious effort involved: there is little sweetness, little natural movement of attraction. The image is thereby made dubious and to some degree inauthentic. And the further I try to take the symbol, the worse the problem gets: the physical realities comprising the symbol can only become a greater obstacle as I try to feel what it seems that I ought to feel, but do not.
The male body is not an object of erotic appeal to me, and hardly even of aesthetic appeal in comparison with the female. And it therefore gives me no avenue for the transfiguration of the erotic into the spiritual (or, as I suppose it should rightly be, the erotic-spiritual). The male person, body and soul, cannot for me be the object of eros in its general sense: the exquisite yearning that is rooted in the physical and calls one toward a "measureless consummation" (Yeats) that includes, transfigures, and transcends its origin.
The obstacle is not only in the specifically sexual nature of the nuptial symbol. There are also those secondary complementarities of the male-female relationship: active and receptive, beholding and beheld, protecting and protected, and so forth. I'll even go so far as to name that which, according to modern sensibilities, should not exist: authority and obedience. For it seems clear to me that, however much they may insist otherwise, women generally want their husbands to be in some fundamental way in command. Not, of course, in the manner of a despot subjugating and exploiting a slave, but in a way based on wisdom, strength, and love—a way that is, finally, exactly what St. Paul commends in that passage so objectionable to our time, Ephesians 5:22–33.
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