Reading
The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis for the first time and came upon this passage today. How I need to hear this, again and again.
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 5:25).
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, fanatical, or lukewarm Church on
earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labors
to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like
(and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs.
--C. S. Lewis,
The Four Loves, pp. 105-6
