Easter Vigil 2001. (I told some people I would put this on the blog. I hope it still "holds up.")
As someone who did not grow up in the Episcopal Church, I can tell you that the Easter Vigil is the high point of my year. The splendor and grandeur of this service never fail to thrill me. Each year we move, in relatively short order, through all the experiences and emotions of life—from doubt to faith, from fear to courage, from sorrow to joy, and from death to life. At the center of all this movement is the Christian hope—a hope that is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus. So central is this hope to us that many critics of Christianity have attributed it to wishful thinking. My initial response to this critique is to try to provide some sort of intellectual response to it, but I have decided not to do that this evening.
Instead, I want to consider how the resurrection gives hope to our lives by reflecting on how it has given hope to my life this last year. Though I have only been an Episcopalian for a few years, I can already sense the way the Easter Vigil marks time for me. I can remember all my Easter Vigils spent moving from darkness to light in the company of other believers and doubters, and in the presence of God’s spirit moving in us and through us. I think I am beginning to sense how this Easter Vigil liturgy has helped me make sense out of my life and its events over the past year, and I think I am beginning to see how it gives substance to my hopes.
When I think about this last year in my life, I have several vivid images which come from the experiences of Good Friday and Holy Saturday—i.e. images of death, loss, and absence—images that weren’t there for me a year ago. In many ways, this last year of my life has been, in one way or another, about loss, death, absence, and so I’ve come to the Easter Vigil tonight wondering how the Easter experience can speak to all of that, and I’m hoping it will somehow speak to some of you.
The first such experience I could share tonight comes from my five-year old daughter, Elly. In our family we’ve adopted several domesticated rats this year. Our lease doesn’t permit us to have dogs, but my daughter loves animals and has been wanting a pet really badly, and the science teacher at the kids’ school raises rats. She raises them as food for the snakes in the science lab, and so, though I wouldn’t really consider myself a rodent-lover, I was pleased that we could rescue some of these creatures from the snakes. Not long after we got our first rats, Elly’s rat, whom she had named Snowball, began to seem a little sick. One night, as we put the kids to bed, Barbara and I could see that Snowball’s life was numbered in hours and not days, and we kept our own Vigil that night.
We didn’t have to wait long before Snowball had stopped breathing. We put the little white rat in a box and braced ourselves for the morning. As I told Elly about Snowball’s demise I could see all the darker feelings we’ve worked through tonight flash across her face—fear, sorrow, anger, and doubt. After she verified for herself that Snowball was indeed gone, I told her that we could bury her pet in the back yard. I dug a hole and we placed the rat in the hole, and then, using a bevy of bricks we constructed a small ziggurat, which remains just outside my bedroom window.
I asked Elly if she wanted to say a prayer or anything and I was quite surprised to hear that she, having no training, was neither eulogizing nor praying to God, but was speaking directly to Snowball. Her “prayer” was simple: she simply said “Snowball I love you. I miss you. I hope you like it in this hole.” In her little prayer was a profound expression of both presence and absence. She knew that Snowball’s body was in a hole and that she would never again be able to play with her small furry friend, but by speaking directly to Snowball she was speaking directly to the rat’s presence. Though only a rat was involved, I think Elly expressed the feeling we all have when we lose someone we love—a terribly feeling of absence combined with an almost haunting feeling of presence.
A second image that I think has helped me explore the meaning of the resurrection comes from the beach here in Newport. Last May 21st, not long after our last Easter Vigil, I was trying to get in a little surfing before our 9:00 a.m. Sunday Bible Study. I was surfing just south of the 28th Street jetty and I was parked by the pier. As I was walking along the beach towards my car I suddenly ran into a single long-stemmed rose stuck into the sand at the edge of the water. When I saw it I stopped and got my bearings. When I realized I was at 22nd Street I instantly knew why the Rose was there. Two days earlier a young man from Santa Ana, 17-year-old Armando Briseno had drowned at this very spot. He had come with friends and was enjoying a warm day when a rip current which everyone who surfs that spot knows well, pulled him out to sea were he died.
Since I’ve started surfing I’ve often found myself imagining what it would be like to lose a loved-one in this way. Last year four young people drowned at our beach, and as I heard each story I considered the horror the families must have gone through. They had gone to the beach for a day of fun and sun. Perhaps they saw their loved-one just a few seconds before they disappeared—and then, at least here Newport Beach, those who drown do tend to actually disappear. Not only are there rip currents pulling people out to sea, there are often strong currents up and down the coast dragging people, living and dead, hundreds of yards up and down shore. Last Sunday, after our morning worship, I went surfing. I paddled out just north of the 56th Street Jetty, and I when got out about 40 minutes later, despite all my efforts to resist the current, I was 36th Street.
I imagine that’s how it is. One minute someone you love is playing in knee-deep water, and then they’re gone. There is no ambulance ride to the hospital. Sometimes there is no body at all. Twice in the last year I’ve been surfing as I watched life-guards in a scarab 100 yards from shore somberly search the shelf for a drowning victim. The family and friends must simply pack their things, get in their car, and drive home. I’ve imagined how incredibly sharp the sense of absence must be for those who lose a loved-one this way.
But, by the time I ran across that single rose planted in the early dawn hours on the shore at 22nd Street, Armando Briseno’s body had already been recovered. What sense of presence did this beautiful, fragrant, but ephemeral monument mark when there was not even a body in this place, but only the hungry emptiness of a by-then-calm sea? I don’t know. Perhaps someone who loved Armando Briseno sensed that because his last living moments had been spent in that spot, something of his presence still lingered. Was it a mother, a girlfriend, a brother who came to the beach that morning and quietly planted that red, thorny marker? I don’t know, but I think that rose was planted to express a sense of lingering presence in the midst of absence—a sense that life does somehow conquer death—that something of Armando Briseno was both lost and found at the spot.
I’ve had many other moments like this in the last year, but let me just briefly share one more, very personal image of this confluence of absence and presence. As most of you know, this last year Barbara and I lost a child early in the third trimester of Barbara’s pregnancy. For us, this child had lived only in the realm of hopes—his was a life which came to us only through clothes and furniture purchased in anticipation, and, of course, through tiny movements sometimes slightly distending my wife’s swelling belly—distensions which only vaguely hinted at the person inside. Only after he was already gone could we hold his little body, marvel at the perfect fingers and toes, and stare into the sweetness of his little face. His ashes are buried in our memorial garden here at St. Michael’s—a garden I can stare into from my office every day. Sometimes I will speak to Christian, reminding him that we have not forgotten him. Maybe I’m also reminding myself that life, all life, no matter how small, or short, is precious. I think I’m also reminding myself that though my typical paternal hopes have had to be forsaken, I cling to the hope that there is a life beyond this one, a life that conquers death. There is, in the midst of Christian David Felder’s absence, a lingering sense of his presence, even though his presence was, for me, almost exclusively a sense of hopeful absence.
When we celebrate the Easter Vigil we explore this feeling of presence and absence which always seems to accompany death. The two women in today’s gospel, both named Mary, who went to the Tomb that first morning, were moving through the dawn with precisely that experience of presence and absence. They did not know what you and I know. They did not know the tomb was empty and Jesus had risen. They were going, in the words of this evening’s gospel, “to see the tomb.” But instead of seeing the tomb, they saw an angel, an angel announcing that “Jesus the crucified” was risen.
Since their experience of absence was probably the same as ours, it would be tempting to see in their experience of presence as the same as ours. But I think theirs was different. Their encounter with Jesus’ presence caused them to react in an amazing way. They fell down, grabbed his feet, and worshipped. This might seem like an obvious response to us, but I think it was actually rather extraordinary. Remember, these two Mary’s were nice Jewish girls, committed to monotheism and antagonistic to the idea of worshipping anything or anyone except the invisible God. But, when confronted with the risen Jesus, their only response was to worship him. If we stop to think about it, our acts of worship tonight are also extraordinary. On this night, we, like them, fall down and worship god revealed to us, not in the vastness of the cosmos, nor in the beauty of creation, nor in the elegance of philosophical claims about uncaused causes, or even in mystical spiritual notions, but we worship god as revealed to us in the crucified Jesus, now raised to life. We find here, in this place, the living presence of Jesus. Here tonight, with all that we’ve been doing this hour, isn’t that how our hearts want to respond?. Don’t we want to fall down and worship god, as a god who came close to us, who became human, suffered and died with us, and thereby conquered death? We may have heard and believed the theological claim that God is love, but in worshipping god revealed in Jesus we find out what love really is, and thus begin to really know and love god, and when we begin to love god, knowing, because of Jesus, that god loves us, we begin to worship in a new and deeper way.
As I worship the living Jesus, his resurrection life gives substance to my hope for a resurrection life for me, and you, and all those we love who have died. I know this sounds like it’s just wishful thinking, and maybe it is, but I think it’s the kind of wishful thinking Frederick Buechner speaks of. He says that Christianity is “mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept. Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.”
I think this is right. I think our wishful yearning for the presence of those who are now absent has come to us from the truth of Jesus’ presence in the midst of his absence. The truth we have celebrated, and I hope entered into a bit tonight, is the truth that caused my five-year old to pray to a deceased rodent, that planted that rose on the beach, and that makes me speak out my office door into an “empty” garden. I’m not going to try tonight to explain how that truth can be found, but I think we, like those two Mary’s in the gospel, have come to the right place find it. We are exploring the truth that sets our hearts wishing at the only place we know to go—worshipping at the nail-pierced feet of the risen Jesus.

Thoughts on my Puritan Upbringing and the Salem Witch Trials.

This week in Humanities Core we are discussing the role of Puritan Theology in the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692.

I was raised in a Christian community that very self-consciously thought of themselves as the modern-day Puritans. They are sometimes referred to as the “Plymouth Brethren,” so-called because they claimed to have the same theology, worship, and communal organization as those who settled in Plymouth in 1620. Garrison Keillor, who was raised in a similar group, calls them the “Sanctified Brethren.” It’s hard to label them because they refuse to label themselves. The claim all labels and denominations are human inventions, even “corruptions,” of the community Christ aimed to create, and so all denominations are, to some degree, heretical, according to them.

Still, they do share some common characteristics. They have no ordained clergy (unlike the New England Puritans), often insist on women wearing veils on their head during worship, and celebrate the “Lord’s Supper” every week around a simple ritual that consists of Scripture reading, “spontaneous” prayer, and singing (without musical accompaniment), all led by the male-members of the group. Women sit in silence (except to sing).

I grew up in the Puritan environment, perched on the very edge of hell, sensing the infernal demons waiting under my bed, ready to snatch me and drag me away. Even as a child of four or five years of age I would spend every night sobbing in my bed praying for God to have mercy on me and accept me. Then, every day, I was assured of the comforts of God’s grace and the certainties of his love, but reminded that these benefits were experienced only by the elect.

While I had doubts about my place, as an individual, within the community of the elect, I had no doubts that my religious community was the “elect.” The logic was that the smaller the group, the more likely they are to contain the true believers, the chosen ones, because “narrow was the gate” that led to eternal life, but “broad was the road and wide the gate” that led to destruction. Our failure to win a more substantial following was further proof of our election.

But, as an individual, you could never really know that you were chosen. I mean, we believed that we were saved by grace through faith, but how was one to know they had faith, true, saving faith? The only possible proof was in the “fruit” of a holy life, but we could never be sure. I strove to live the holiest life possible, subjecting even my every thought to divine scrutiny in hopes that I could see this fruit.

But, on the other hand (and here we may differ from seventeenth-century Puritans), we were always told that since we were saved by grace, through faith, and not by works, we could, theoretically, know that we were saved. Those who think salvation is based on “works,” or on “being good,” were doomed to insecurity because you could never know that you had done enough. We, on the other hand, knew it was impossible to ever “do enough” to merit God’s favor and forgiveness, that was a matter of grace . . . and faith—saving faith—and there was the rub. How could you know that you had that kind of “saving faith?”

Instead of “knowing” I had that kind of faith, I tended to assume that other people had it, and they knew they had it, which made my doubts all-the-more troubling. We believed in “the Rapture,” which meant that we believed that near the end of time Jesus would come and “snatch” the elect out of this world, leaving the rest of us behind. Many times growing up I would find myself alone in our house and immediately be thrown into a panic, thinking I had been “left behind.”

But this insecurity seems to have a mirroring power that works quite effectively on the communal level, even for those individuals, like me, who were plagued by doubts about our own, personal salvation. Our election as a community was always seen in contrast to the non-elect around us. The easiest target was the Roman Catholic Church. They were our exact opposite in most respects mirroring our simplicity of worship with complex rituals and ornate liturgical practices. Reading Revelation, we interpreted the Roman Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon, drunk on the blood of the saints.” Revelation’s “Babylon” is clearly a veiled reference to Rome, and the Roman Church, with all of its money and wealth seemed to be the spitting image of Revelation’s harlot.

But this Manichean mirroring extended to all areas of life. God loved the Dallas Cowboys, but hated the Oakland Raiders. God loved the United States, but hated the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. God created men to lead, and women to follow. God loved hymns, but the Devil loved Rock-and-Roll. God was a Republican, and . . . Ted Kennedy was a Democrat.

So this week, re-reading Puritan theological texts and thinking about the Salem Witch Trials is like visiting my childhood. In fact, I can remember my mother telling me that what happened at Salem was a good thing. “Maybe some false people were accused,” she told me, “but witches are real, and I’m sure they burned (sic) real witches.”

Does a doctrine of election require a doctrine of the Devil? I suspect it requires something like that. To look in the mirror and see an angel staring back I must, at times, look into the crowd and see a diabolical image mocking my angelic pretensions. If I am “straight,” the mocking face might be gay. If I am Protestant, it might be Catholic. If I am male, it might be female.

Since the notion of election, no matter what its guise, seems to require the demonization of the other, perhaps this is the greatest enemy of civilization and the challenge we most need to overcome.

Thoughts on Lolita

I grew up in an environment in which fiction was not much read. Sure, I was exposed to the usual Dr. Seuss fare normally given to beginning readers, but even in my earliest acquaintance with books, I was given biographies, histories, and, of course, Bible stories. I did go through one phase, lasting two years, which, because our television broke and my father refused to replace the devilish device, involved my reading every Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novel ever written. In high school, we hardly did any serious reading, and at home my nightstand featured Ironside’s Bible commentaries.

I was not exposed to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The subject matter would have been unmentionable, and the novel itself considered obscene. As I grew older, and increasingly more open-minded, one might even say, “liberal,” I never really wanted to read the book because it sounded “sick”—filled with perverted fantasies about middle-aged men having sex with pubescent girls—and I was increasingly aware of the degree to which young girls, many more than I would have thought, suffer some kind of sexual exploitation before reaching adulthood. My loyalties to the woman who had suffered such exploitations made the novel seem completely unappealing.

But, because I wanted to read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, I picked up a copy of Lolita a couple of weeks ago, and, at the age of forty—a contemporary of Nabokov’s narrator—I dove into the novel, finishing it on Holy Saturday after grabbing snatches of it between Palm Sunday services, scheduling acolytes, and writing two homilies.

What first grabbed me was the remarkably expressive prose that carefully observed not only “Humbert Humbert’s” unstable and demented psychological state, but the most mundane, but life-giving details of everyday suburban life. Nabokov manages to draw the reader into the situation and mind set of the narrator without ever making him truly sympathetic. We see that he is a selfish, obsessive creep who seems to be unable, or unwilling, to respond appropriately to the young girl in his charge.

But the book is also driven by a compelling plot. I’ve never heard this novel described this way, but Nabokov creates so much tension, and foreshadows so deftly, that Lolita becomes a real page turner. I could not put it down.

Is this book obscene? No. A friend of mine asked me, when I was only through the first part, if I would “be honest” and admit that it was kind of a “turn on.” She had not read the novel, but she assumed that Nabokov must be working in the familiarly pornographic realm and that the novel plays to some kind of twisted, but, ubiquitous male fantasy. But it does not. The reader hoping for a salacious narrative will be sorely disappointed by Lolita.

Furthermore, the narrator gives us plenty of chances to glimpse the destructiveness of Humbert’s behavior. Following his first sexual encounter with Dolores he says she suddenly seems like a “ghost.” Throughout we see glimpses of her pain. At one point she tells him, “He broke my heart . . . you broke my life.” Then there is the heart-rending thirty-second chapter of part two in which the narrator confesses that there was more than ample evidence of the deep pain Dolores was experiencing.

This is a novel that will stick with me for a long time. I’m haunted by the revelation, in the “forward,” that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.” H.H. had hoped Mrs. Schiller would have a boy, but instead she gives birth to a dead girl, a symbol of the living death men continue to inflict on young girls.

It is this dead girl that will haunt me. She haunts me because I have seen her sisters. I see them all around me. They are women whose uncles, fathers, brothers, neighbors, clergymen, and stepfathers have broken their lives. With all of these wounded women walking around, I wonder where their persecutors are. Do I recognize them when I see them? Who are these demons that walk among us? Can we tell who they are, or do we only see the ghosts they make—ghosts that are all, in a way, the same ghost--the ghost of Lolita?

Hunting Witches: Humanities Core Spring Quarter, Here we go again.
I think this is the most interesting quarter of Humanities Core. In this quarter we explore the relationship between invisible principles and the visible order—the vary heart of what we do in the humanities.

Today Michael Clark introduced his thesis: “Society is regulated by connecting the visible characteristics of Order to the invisible principles of Law.”

I may have garbled this a bit when I tried to discuss it with my students, but hopefully they got the idea: societies construct a visible order based upon certain (assumed to be correct) invisible principles/laws. In a way, this reminds us of both Plato and Cicero. Both men tried to construct an order grounded in some kind of “reasonable” set of principles. For Cicero, these principles are found in nature. Only nature is authoritative and accessible enough to provide societies with a reasonable basis for order. Plato’s schema is harder to see because his schema relies on the rulers being philosophers who contemplate the divine/ideal realm. But both recognize that this order cannot be arbitrary. Similarly, the Enlightenment discourse on rights presupposed a rational basis for the social contract. The Rights of Man and Citizen is meant to be a (written) expression of some principles, which, to the authors of the Declaration of Independence are “self evident.”

But is establishing this “invisible” basis for our visible order so easy? It seems to me it is not. Students in Humanities Core tend to dismiss the Puritans (and McCarthy) as fanatical, failing to understand the “rational” basis of their beliefs. It seems to me this is a trick we all play on ourselves. The other guy is always irrational, but we are always rational. Our beliefs are correct, grounded in reason, or God, or nature, but the other’s beliefs are irrational, godless, and unnatural.

In addition to Clark’s thesis, I hope students were able to follow his comparison between Miller and Hansen. For Miller the problem is repression. If people could be free they would be better off. For Hansen, the problem is people need regulation (though in the case of Salem there may have been problems with the system of regulation). In Clockwork Orange (the film) the society Kubrick depicts has lost its ability to connect the visible order with invisible laws, and therefore must resort to sheer coercion to enforce that order.

Does our society have a common set of values and principles upon which we can base its order? If so, what basis do we have for accepting that order (especially in the absence of God, reason, or nature to endorse it)?

Was my Passion Sunday Homily Heretical? (delivered 4/4/04 at Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, CA)

Maybe. Maybe I should say it was probably heretical. I definitely deviated from what has been the orthodox position on the death of Jesus.

Why did I decide to become a heretic? A number of thoughtful people, many of whom attend church regularly, have been questioning the way Christians interpret the death of Jesus. I’ve been listening to their questions, concerns, and complaints, which have only grown louder with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, and I had them in mind as I sat down to write my homily. After wrestling with their question, I think I have to agree with them: Christian theology struggles to create a meaningful interpretation of the death of Jesus that doesn’t become nonsensical, self-contradicting, or sinister.

Christians could have chosen to construct their narrative of Jesus’ death entirely within the “martyrdom” meta-narrative. They could have been satisfied to depict Jesus as a martyr, but, for the most part, they chose to go a step further and describe Jesus death in terms of the “sacrifice” meta-narrative. Clearly this image of “sacrifice” is central to Christian theology. We call that table in front of the church “an altar,” and we frequently even use the word “sacrifice” to describe both Jesus’ death and the Eucharist. In my homily I never questioned the use of the “sacrifice” metaphor to read Jesus’ death, but I did question the way Christians, especially twentieth-century Christians, have understood this sacrificial image.

Not satisfied to leave the notion of Jesus as sacrifice in front of us, some Christians have tried to read the sacrificial narrative in juridical terms. In this reading, Jesus’ death becomes the place where God’s justice and love meet. God is just, and therefore can’t excuse sin, but God is also loving, and therefore doesn’t want to punish us for our sins. Therefore, God becomes human and, in a sense, punishes himself by punishing Jesus, thus finding the perfect compromise that satisfies both his (sic) justice and love. The other reading uses an economic language to understand the sacrificial narrative of Jesus’ death. In this reading, we owed a debt (or a “fine” if you want to link it with the juridical reading) to God because of our sin. We couldn’t pay this debt, so Jesus paid it for us. His suffering literally pays for our sins.

While both of these readings can find their roots in the New Testament Epistles (especially Romans, Hebrews, and I John), the logic of these readings is a bit troubling. What kind of justice would be satisfied by punishing an innocent victim? Is sin really part of an economy, and if so, how do we know that love, by itself, can’t overcome this debt without requiring suffering? Did what the Romans did to Jesus really “equal” the suffering necessary to atone for the sins of the whole world? Some respond to this question by saying that since Jesus was “one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man” the divine side of him, being infinite, was able to experience infinite suffering while on the cross. Some suggest this infinite suffering actually took place when “darkness covered the earth” and was expressed by Jesus’ cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”—both signs, according to this reading, that God had turned his back on Jesus who was, as an infinite being, experiencing both all of human sin and the eternal torments of every person who ever lived (or of all the elect if you are a Calvinist) during those hours on the cross. But, if this is true, why did God need to get the Romans involved? Also, this requires God to “create” a human person to torture and kill while he is punishing the “divine” Jesus with all the torments of hell. Is that just? Does that violate the unity of Christ? If Jesus is infinite, wouldn’t a paper-cut, or a “pinch” be experienced infinitely, so why all the flogging, beating, and nailing?

I could go on, but I won’t. A lot of smart people—people smarter than I—have been aware of these problems for almost 1800 years, but they have felt satisfied with their understanding of this sacrifice. I’m not sure I’m one of those people any longer.

So instead of trying to explain the “sacrificial” nature of Jesus’ death in juridical or economical terms, I decided to let it just “sit there.” Having done that, I read Rene Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, and concluded that Girard was right: sacrifice does not seem to be about expiation, but about deflecting violence onto an innocent victim. By this reading, it is not God who requires Jesus to suffer, but us. It is our violent impulse(s) which requires blood and sacrifice (cf. with the Cain and Abel story). Thus, I affirm God’s love and justice, but by suggesting that God condemns (as opposed to planning and executing) what happened to Jesus.

Now, I’ve developed much of this out of my recent fascination with Process Philosophy. According to this reading, all suffering is incarnational, since God is always right with us in the midst of all of our experience. Still, it might be that Jesus’ suffering may represent a unique example of human-divine suffering as the realization of a universally redemptive possibility. Jesus becomes the innocent (sacrificial) victim par excellence, demonstrating both God’s union with humanity and God’s condemnation of our destructive, mimetic impulses.

Is this heresy? Probably, but I am concerned with how we can still “think” Christianity today, and I suspect the juridical and economic atonement discourses may be losing their grip on us because they require us to read God’s abuse of Jesus as loving (even with an incarnational reading) and they propose a rather strange account of “justice” (requiring justice to be served by punishing an innocent victim—something straightforward sacrificial reading avoids). Perhaps it’s time to find new language. I think I may have found this new language in the unlikeliest of places, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ll write more on that later.

Love of Mike Article, Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, April 2004

Which is more important in a marriage, passion or commitment? These ideals are often set up as competing, not complementary values, in part because we tend to see life as a series of compromises in which we sacrifice our greatest desires in order to achieve more reasonable goals. We stopped playing in that rock band so we could go to law school. We gave up our dream of living in SoHo so our kids could live in the suburbs. And often, we are told, marriage is an inevitable passion-killer, forcing us to cast aside those longing glances, passionate kisses, and evenings devoted to aromatic bath-tubs and romantic candles in favor of harried discussions over crammed calendars, pecks on the cheek, and evenings devoted to children’s science-fair projects.

The author of Genesis, a book we’ve been studying in our Adult Sunday School Class, struggled with the same issues and explored them through Jacob’s relationship with his two wives, Rachel and Leah. Jacob fell in love with Rachel the first time he saw her. He was so desperate to marry her that he worked seven years for her father in order to be granted her hand. His passion for her was so intense that the seven years “seemed like only a few days because of the love he had for her.” (29:20) Yet his father-in-law played a trick on him, and, probably using veils and the darkness of night, married Jacob to his older daughter Leah, instead of Rachel. The text describes Rachel in terms of her effect on the eyes: she was beautiful. But the text describes Leah in terms of the capacity of her eyes. (Though the meaning of the Hebrew word is unclear, it suggests that Leah had “tender eyes,” possibly meaning she was perceptive and perhaps empathetic.) So, because he was a bigamist, Jacob was able to live out this conflict between passion and commitment literally, married to two women, one known for her beautiful appearance, and one known for the beauty of her inner self. One marriage relationship is driven by passion, the other by commitment.

The key to the story is their wedding night, when, in the darkness and intimacy of the moment, Jacob, who had loved Rachel for seven years, could not tell the difference between the two sisters. This seems to imply that the pleasures promised by passion do not always live up to our expectations. Beautiful people can sometimes be as selfish, cold, or impassive in the dark as they are in the light, and apparently, Rachel’s beauty, so obvious in the light, was of no use to her on her wedding night when her less attractive sister, Leah, could easily her take her place and Jacob was none-the-wiser. This forces us to rethink through our response to the passion-commitment issue. I think Genesis argues that while passion can create incredible expectations in us, only commitment can help us find fulfillment.

Fortunately, in our culture, we choose our mates, and often we can combine passion and commitment in wonderful ways. Last night I came home at 10:30 p.m. and found no candles burning, no incense wafting, and no bubbly aromatic bathtub waiting. Instead, I found a baseball bat left in the hallway . . . again, a garbage can full of dirty-diapers, and a house full of sleeping loved-ones. I changed for bed, brushed my teeth, and read an article in this week’s New Yorker about glamorous designer Miuccia Prada, listening to the gentle but heavy breathing of both my wife and baby--a tiny percussion duet—creating the perfect music for my mood. When my eyes grew heavy I turned off the light and rolled over, “spooning” my wife. She responded with a semi-conscious groan which I interpreted to mean, “welcome home, I love you,” and she nestled her back against my chest and quickly sank back into her R.E.M. sleep. This was not the passionate dream of marriage I imagined as a younger man—a dream filled with chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne, and lingerie—but it was more than I could have hoped for—the comforting intimacy of knowing I am loved and needed—and that was enough.