When I think back to that overwhelming, all-consuming, glorious feeling of falling in love with my husband, I recall only being able to see the good in him.
Of all the men in the world, he was surely the best of them, and he could do no wrong. I’m pretty sure he felt the same way about me (right, honey?).
In the play, The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare coined the famous line: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ The pretty follies that themselves commit.”
While there is truth to this statement in the sense that we all act a little bit ridiculous when we are newly in love, after seven years of marriage, I feel the need to challenge The Bard about this supposed blindness.
Early in the relationship, as we transitioned from friends to dating, I brought my concerns to God, “What happens if I’m just not feeling it?” Translation: What do I do on the days that I’m not so super enthusiastic and head over heels? The response from God was instantaneous and matter-of-fact, “You’re not always ‘feeling it’ with me, and yet here we are.”
I was reminded of my pilgrimage to World Youth Day Rio in 2013, where I had experienced an outpouring of God’s grace. I was overwhelmed by his beauty and generosity. He had truly romanced me. There was just one problem: I had to go home.
This is my Mount Tabor moment, my own little witness of the Transfiguration. Like Peter, who longed to stay and “make three booths”, I longed to remain there, frozen in time, like Christ the Redeemer who stands protectively over the city at the pinnacle of Corcovado. Augustine’s reflection stands true for me just as much as it did for Peter:
“Come down, Peter. You were eager to go on resting on the mountain; come down, preach the word…Go down to labour on earth, to serve on earth, to be despised, to be crucified on earth. Life came down to be killed; bread came down to go hungry; the way came down to grow weary on a journey; the fountain came down to experience thirst; and you are refusing to endure toil?”
The disciples were not “blind” during the Transfiguration; rather, they were given the grace of a momentary glimpse of the beatific vision. But they could not stay there. Mount Tabor had to precede Calvary.
In other words, God gifted them with enough of a vision to take courage and move forward towards the Via Dolorosa. Without the vision, they would have to enact their will. Therein lies the rub.
Enacting your will to carry on with the task of loving is not so easy when the dazzling sight you once beheld has given way to the realities of what it means to be human. Ask Peter. He literally saw Christ in a heavenly light display and still denied him three times. So it is with falling in love.
I don’t believe we are blind when the love is new and fresh. I think it is precisely at this time that God grants us the extraordinary grace of seeing the other as he sees them, brimming with beauty and potential.
It is when this vision of the other subsides, and the sight is not so dazzling, that God is inviting us to enact our will and carry on with the task of loving. This is the Cross that one takes up in the sacrament of marriage, and at times it can feel brutal.
I believe God does not give out a generic grace for married people. It makes more sense to me that he gives me the grace specifically needed to love the husband I have chosen, in all his beauty and his brokenness, and likewise gives him the specific grace required to love me, in all my beauty and my brokenness. It just requires a fiat, an act of the will.
When Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection, his wounds did not disappear. Rather, they remained as a glorious sign of the most epic love story.
To look back and mourn those days when everything in a relationship seemed perfect, before we knew disappointment, pain and even occasional loneliness, is to forget that Calvary is followed by Easter Sunday, where Christ’s wounds become glorified. To erase the struggle is to erase the whole point of the story.
May God grant us the wisdom not to miss the Resurrection because we are too busy looking back at the Transfiguration.
Rachael Ndaira is a wife, mother, and teacher. She writes at rachaelndaira.substack.com
