A sonnet by G. M. Hopkins includes the line "Patience masks our ruins of wrecked
past purpose." Patience watches, with bloodshot and tearful eyes, our
unfulfilled desires. She protects us from despair but also deceives us with
false hope. Patience invites loss and yet persists in obedience.
In the famous
passage in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul claims that "Love is patient … always
perseveres ... never fails." On the contrary, I have to say that love has
failed to sustain my marriage, that patience has simply masked the failure and
that further perseverence is useless.
—Nat.
Those words seemed very poetic yesterday, but I must admit that they are a bit extreme. Love has not failed. A marriage needs more than love -- certainly more than romance, but also more than the sort of love Paul wrote about -- and in our case it was not a lack of love or patience but some other inadequacies that caused it's demise.
ReplyDelete--Nat.