So, it occurred to me after writing the last Confessions post, that there might me something more to say about Augustine's comment that he "rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured." That seemed to capture the attitude toward romance and relationships that prevail in the social consciousness of the day, and my own as well. Under the auspices of the supposed proverb, "love is blind", there seems to be a willful blindness and abandonment to the consuming nature of romantic desire. It is seen as the "yellow-brick road" that leads to the "emerald city" of lifelong relational bliss where many discover that the promises there made by the "wizard" are hype and disillusionment.
It seems that the same romantic obsessiveness was alive in Augustine's day, even without such stimulants as You've Got Mail and The Bachelor. It was only later that Augustine came around to understand his error in not considering it "more than a marginal issue how the beauty of having a wife lies in the obligation to respect the discipline of marriage and bring up children." It is not unlike the experience of practicing many of the spiritual disciplines. Their beauty lies not only in the "highs" of experience, but also in the "lows" and therefore in the entire covenanted experience itself.
Of course, I don't speak from marital experience, just by way of extrapolation and analogy. But, from what I've heard, this seems to be the right way to see things. What do you think?
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