Defective Hearts

I am married. To give some idea of how I feel about the woman I won, let me say that I pursued her, helplessly, rather unabashedly, and occasionally nearly against my own will, for ten years. She was one of my best friends all that time. We met when she came into my Dad's bookstore looking for a job and I, in a very uncharacteristic gesture of raw pursuit, took her phone number from her application and called her to ask her to go out with me. I loved her the moment I saw her. Yeah, yeah, cheesy and dopey, but true as the blue sky and the green earth below. I loved her helplessly and titanically and I knew, if this woman turns out to be half as spectacular as my heart said she was the first time I met her, I was smitten beyond words. I would chase her to the ends of the earth, woo her until my dying breath, for nothing more than a contented smile on her face and the knowledge that I put it there. And she ended up being even more than I expected. Love like this does happen. If I wasn't living it, I wouldn't believe it.

Hell. I AM living it, and half the time I don't believe it.

Still, we fight. I think we fight even more because we love each other so ferociously. It's ironic, but if you give it a little thought, it makes sense. So we had a fight on the way to church the other night. Like always, it was about some annoying, meaningless little thing that happens to be about the same emotional shape as something much bigger and more deeply rooted. For me, it's usually about the fact that, lovely as she is, my wife reminds me of my Dad, with whom I have always had a quietly desperate, arid relationship. One doesn't need a degree in psychology to know that bad father-child relationship crap is the best fertilizer to grow marital strifes in. Like all our other arguments, we proceed into them whole-hog, knowing we will eventually work through it and that out commitments to each other are rock solid, making such arguments relatively safe. On the other hand, I have been particularly raw about some of these issues lately, and this argument was really raking the wounds.

We arrived at church in a cloud of bitter acid, neither of us yet giving an inch and, for my part, feeling very hurt. I was in no mood to be at church. I could hardly bring myself not to snarl at people who approached me, and I was certainly in no frame of mind to hide what was happening between us for the eyes of polite society.

We went in. We sat down. The music started.

We go to a large church, a huge church. There were several hundreds of people in attendance that Saturday evening. I sat there fuming, stewing in emotions that felt, at the moment, like rejection and loss, like being misunderstood and uncared for. In that multitude, I felt utterly lonely and bereft, hollow as a gourd and lost as innocence.

And that's part of why I was so quietly shocked to see her in the row ahead of me, five or six seats down. It explains part of why I responded to seeing her so strongly, but it doesn't explain everything. Let me go back a bit.

For the sake of propriety I'll call this woman Sadie. I met her four years ago or so, when I first came to my church. When I met her...

How can I say this? How can I put it in the proper context without cheapening it? Bottom line: things like this shouldn't happen. That's what I thought when I met her. There shouldn't be the capacity for this in my heart. If there is, something is terribly wrong. If there is, hearts are defective. There's been a terrible mistake.

I am a man, and men, at least, will know what I mean when I say that you occasionally see or meet a woman and find yourself physically attracted to her. Big deal. The less scrupulous of us will fantasize about her. The very less scrupulous will pursue her and maybe woo her into an affair. Those of us committed to our marriages will recognize it as merely a knee-jerk meaningless erotic response and shut it down, think about Ernest Borgnine eating pizza or simply look the other way. This- plain sexual attraction- doesn't stop at marriage, and the best of us are trained mentally to deal with it and dismiss it. It's relatively easy, with practice.

Physical attraction is one thing.

Meeting Sadie, however, was different. Sexual attraction was part of it. Sure. In the same sense that grammar is part of a Shakespearean sonnet.

OK, I'm circling this, afraid to land on it, afraid of how it will sound and simultaneously afraid of diminishing it. Here's what it was: when I met Sadie, I loved her. You ask (as do I), was it like when I first met my wife?

A little. Maybe more than a little.

Being around Sadie was like being with someone you'd loved passionately in a previous life, loved with an intensity that was too strong for death to erase. Sadie was lovely to me; lovely in the classic sense. She effortlessly, apparently against her own will, exercised a totally specific magnetism upon me, so real and strong and palpable that I tended to overcompensate, fighting it. Where I would give a friendly hug to other people at church, or touch their arm while chatting, or even just shake hands, I never touched Sadie. I couldn't, for the terrible fear that somehow touching her might result in some sort of spontaneous reaction that would reveal the secret of my complete thrall for her for all to see. I couldn't touch her, not for all the awkwardness in the world, because I so desperately wanted to.

I stood ridiculously far apart from her when we talked. And here's the rub of it all-- because of certain involvements at church, we did have to talk. We had to spend time together. O Cruel Fate! I loved that time together and loathed it in equal parts! Of course she didn't reciprocate those feelings. I knew that. She was, like me, married, and apparently happily so. She was content and well-loved and completely beyond and above any such wild and reckless emotions, especially for me. I knew that. It had to be so. Because if it wasn't so... if she did reciprocate in her heart...

O cruel, awful, capricious fate.

But after a while, Sadie moved away. I didn't have to see her anymore. And that was good. Out of sight, out of heart. Because as much as she held me in her thrall, it was a useless, pointless, ultimately unfulfillable thrall. She moved away and I was relieved, because I wouldn't have to struggle with that horrible duality anymore. At least not overtly.

And then, that Saturday night at church, a year or so after she'd moved away, in the midst of a terrible, hurtful argument with my wife, there, in a crowd of thousands, was Sadie, only a few feet away. That seemed then, and it seems to me now, like one whopper of a coincidence. It turned me inside out.

I wasn't going to talk to her. Wasn't, wasn't, wasn't. So I stood off to the side at the end of the service and refused to look in her direction. But- and this was important! - I didn't duck out immediately. Sadie approached me. She touched my arm and smiled and greeted me. We talked for several minutes. She was back in town for a couple of days, visiting. Things were good for her. We exchanged trivialities. We stood about five feet apart.

Sigh.

I don't love her. I don't love Sadie. But I recognize, when I am near her, the capacity to love her, hugely and ferociously. The feeling is irrepressible. It is giddy and terrible and frightening and inspiring. But in the end, sadly, it is just insipid. Pointless. Empty. Silly. Ultimately, tragically, useless.

WHY is that possible? I assumed, growing up, that sexual desire for a variety of women wouldn't stop after marriage. I prepared myself for that. What I never considered, however, was the possibility that there would be more than one socket for abject adoration in my heart! That doesn't seem logical or right! Why would God design hearts that way? How can it not but lead to sadness and loss, or at the very least, this occasional sense of abject, pitifull emptiness at the Unfulfillable Wow? My picture of the romantic heart had been of a power junction with one socket: True Love Goes Here. And now, because of the timing of meeting Sadie again, so unexpectedly and poignantly, I was face-to-face with the fact that there are, apparently, more sockets. There may even be a whole line of sockets, a whole line of potential loves. This seems so horribly, unfairly wrong to me. To me, to my wife, even to Sadie.

So my wife and I, we worked out our problem that night. We rode home. We made up. But I was haunted by Sadie, by the love that wasn't, and couldn't be. It affected me. So the next morning, rather unexpectedly, I just told my wife about it.

She knew, of course. She wouldn't have brought it up, but she knew, and was glad we talked about it. Talking about it took some of the power of it away, which is understandable, I guess. That was a good thing, a healthy thing. My wife once again proved how unbelievably rare and wonderful she is by listening and empathising and helping me work through it. I told her because I choose her, always and forever, and I want to be current with her, and her with me. That is the intimacy of marriage, and I wanted it to be real. Talking about Sadie with my wife was essential. I discovered it after the fact, and so I am extremely glad I did it.

She said she saw us talking at church. She said she could see what was happening for at least one of us. The distance. The carefulness. The things that so obviously weren't happening, but could've been.

So that is the end of the story- what story there is. But I was left to wonder and worry over this idea of defective hearts. It just seemed wrong. Totally and unthinkingly stupid. Cruel. Dangerous. A cosmic bad joke.

I went for a bike ride in a local park, surrounded by trees and winding paths and one of those peculiar woods-bordered ponds that people in the midwest call lakes. I thought about defective hearts and did what I do best, which is yell at God. I am a petulant, argumentative, distrustful son to my heavenly Papa, but at least I talk to Him about it. I rail and I whine and I carp and I accuse. Fortunately, I know He made me this way and I know His love makes Him patient. I yell at Him about it because I believe, in my deepest heart, that God wants me to ask Him the hardest questions. If for no other reason than that it keeps me talking to Him.

I am an artist, thus I am visual. As I rode, I imagined my original idea of my heart-- a single power junction with one socket: True Love Goes Here. Then I imagined pulling back a curtain and seeing more sockets, identical to the first. I imagined standing back, taking in those additional sockets, then looking up, looking around, seeing additional rows of sockets, lined out above and below. In this odd little mind-movie, I took steps backward, widening my view, turning, and saw row upon row of sockets, lined up in stacks and columns, diminishing upward in a dim blur of perspective. I turned on the spot, and what I had thought was an intimate little room, a shrine to one love, one special socket, was instead a cathedral of mythic proportion, halls upon halls of sockets, each one a potential love, a power-connection to grandeur. All empty, however, except for my one special socket, the one with my wife's name on it.

And suddenly, as has happened on a few other occasions in my life, it was as if God put His hands gently on my shoulders and turned me-- just enough to shift my perspective a few degrees, to give me the slightest, tiniest hint of the view from His side of things. It was extremely subtle, but it made all the difference in the universe.

Maybe we were originally meant to love endlessly and perfectly. Maybe that is how we were designed way back at the beginning, in Eden. Maybe, rather than being a sign of defective design, all those necessarily dormant sockets represent a more perfect design than our fallen-ness allows us to explore. I imagined trying, in my fallen imperfection, to plug Sadie's love into one of those other sockets in my heart. What would happen? Would I experience love times two? That which I share with my wife and a new love, equal and unchallenged, for Sadie?

No. I couldn't. In my fallenness, my love-current is sadly limited. The current would split, and probably not equally. The result would be jealousies and unfulfillment. Frustration. Bitterness. Neither Sadie nor my lovely wife would get the love they deserved and I would most likely grow hard and empty, unable to love anyone with all my heart.

I sensed God very quietly telling me: It isn't the design of your heart that is faulty. Your fallen-ness, inherited from your father Adam, cuts you off from the ultimate love current, which means you simply cannot power more than one socket. That one socket is my gift to you, though. It is a hint of what is to come, once the curtain is pulled aside completely. Enjoy it as fully and unabashedly as you can! Let it be a tantalizing vision of what love might be like on the other side of this life, when the current won't be restricted!

And I thought-- maybe this is what Jesus meant when he said there isn't marriage in heaven. Maybe it's a heresy, but it feels right to me: maybe marriage isn't diminished in heaven, as I'd always rather despondently thought. Maybe all other relationships are simply elevated to the level and intensity of the best marriage relationship! If that is the case, I suspect earthly marriages will still have a special significance, perhaps in the same way that the Jews have a special significance to God, even though we gentiles are grafted into the tree. But still: I imagine a time out of this earthly life when all those sockets in my heart, which are necessarily dormant now, dark and empty, are lit up with some fantastically unlimited love current and we are all capable of loving endlessly and with complete fulfillment.

Then again, maybe that's all crap. I'm not gonna make a doctrine out of it. But it feels like if it is wrong, it is standing right next to the truth in the lineup.

Either way, I am back to a place where I am trusting God's nature. I am trusting His design. I sense, when I complain to Him about it, that He smiles indulgently and confidently and says to me in a joyful whisper: "Just you wait, son. Hang on. Wait it out. The truth of it all will blow you away. Trust me." And I can't help but smile myself, because I sense He can't wait to show me, can't wait to toss me, all of us, into the oceans of joy He's got waiting for us.

So I sigh a wry, relatively happy sigh and promise to wait it out a little longer.