Sacred Marriage: Christ and the Church

This week my blogging group is reading chapter 2 of Sacred Marriage. I have to admit, I struggled with this chapter. It took me a while to figure out why. I was reading about how marital analogies teach us about God, and particularly about Christ and the church, and it was just bothering me for some reason.

And then I figured it out. Thomas writes, "If we are consumed with highlighting where our spouses are falling short, we will miss the divine mysteries of marriage and the lessons it has to teach us." Ah ha!  This made it all click. (Though not until I was a couple of pages later and came back to this sentence.)

Here's what was bothering me. In the analogy of Christ and the Church, he's the husband, the Church is the wife. And the Church isn't perfect. Not even close. So I can identify with that metaphor for my side of things. Church = imperfect; Me = imperfect. Not that that's God's design for the Church, but it's reality. So it makes sense to me.

But Christ is the husband in that metaphor. And Christ is perfect. Ergo, Dan should be perfect. Only he's not (and neither is your husband).

I realize this is a biblical analogy, not one Thomas made up, but it took this book to make me realize that the analogy may cause me to place unrealistic expectations on Dan. It may cause me to highlight where he's falling short, the very thing Thomas warns against. If I'm the Church, he can't look at me and say, "come on Church, live up to your name." I do that just fine - live up to an imperfect comparison. But subconsciously, do I look at Dan's imperfections and think, "come on, Jesus, live up to your name."