Elaine, How I Love Thee

Music to accompany this post.

The last few weeks I have been falling in love with my wife all over again. It is like a spiritual awakening. I am seeing her with fresh eyes. I see the wrinkles forming around her eyes and mouth. She is taking on a look of maturity, and it matches her growth spiritually. There is something very sexy about those lines.

I look at my hands, something I often have done while contemplating my own personhood. Coming out of anesthesia after having my wisdom teeth removed, my mom told me I was looking staring at my hands funny, like they weren’t my own. Some how, though looking at them and realizing they are my own has sometimes granted me a heightened self awareness, I am alive, I am separate from the world, the world exists apart from my imagination. Rolhieser suggests that it is this separation that is at the basis of sexuality. To be sexed is to be divided from the rest of humanity based on gender. I see in my hands today knuckles that are growing knobbier, with more creases. They remind me of my father’s hands, rough with work. I have caught myself taking on attitudes and postures so like his as well. I am maturing. I’ll be thirty this year. I am a pastor, a father, in short an adult. How subtly all this snuck up on me. How subtly Elaine grew from a college sweetheart and salacious girl into a woman.

I step back, and realize what has caught up with me. My breath is caught away; she is so beautiful, inside even more than outside. I held her tight the night before she went away to Chicago, attempting to convey through the touch, through the pressing of her body the depth of love I have for her.

I said, “I’m scared you might not make it back to me.”

“Why?” She asked.

“Because,” I said, “in the movies with someone realizes how much they love another, that is when they loose them.”

I thank God for this romance of the Spirit, for it is as much a romance with him as it is with my wife, his gift to me. My heart races even in the writing of this post, and the praying of this prayer.