schnichael:

72 Days of Brass by Dominic Laing

There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions.

It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

C.S. Lewis, “The Great Divorce”

II

I’ve attended/been in about 15 weddings in the past 15 months. According to the national average, 7.5 of these weddings end in divorce. That statistic always pounded away at my heart, and it always made me pray a little harder for those couples. It never occurred to me that it could be other marriages that fall apart, and not those of my friends.

Which brings me to Kim Kardashian, who filed divorce papers regarding her 72-day-old marriage to NBA athlete Kris Humphries.

(I’ll take “Awkward Transitions” for $1000…)

A little over a year ago, Kim Kardashian turned 30. She graced the cover of “People/US Weekly/Brightly Colored Magazine” with the headline, “Kim at 30: ‘I thought I’d be married by now.’”

Which means that Kim and I have something in common. She and I both have expectations of what Love and Relationship look like in the present, what they’ve presented to us in the past, and how they should present themselves in the future.

III

I’m writing this because, in part, I know people are searching “Kim Kardashian” right now.

I’m writing this because, in part, I hate Halloween.

I’m writing this because, in part, I hate the E! Network and its reality show, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”

I’m also writing this because, in part, it really bums me out when marriages end in divorce.

Mostly, I’m writing this because my first impulse is to make punchline after punchline at the expense of two people who got married thinking it would be forever, but instead got 72 days.

Sad truth: Someone gets divorced, and my first impulse is total meanness.

This is, honest to God, the first thing that came to my head, an imagined conversation:

“Dom, what are you going as for Halloween?”
“I’m going as someone who cares about Kim Kardashian’s marriage.”

This is the part of me I don’t like, the searing, harsh-as-harsh-can-be part of me that needs work like no other, the dark part of me that is unequivocally un-Christ-like.

IV

On Twitter, there is a hashtag that has something to do with listing things that lasted longer than the marriage between Kris and Kim.

Like, for example, my recent summer in Colorado, working on a documentary.

Or, for another example, my crush on Christina Macon in eighth grade, which went nowhere.

Or, for another example, my crush on Morgan Ferrante in junior year of high school, which culminated in me asking her to prom with a poem and a sad-sack bouquet of flowers.

Kim and I share more characteristics than I’d care to admit. But out with it.

V

The sad fact is that I’ve fallen for love more than I’ve fallen in Love.

I’ve become more infatuated with the idea of someone and myself together more than I have actually committed to the work of knowing someone and sharing myself with them and growing closer as it relates to God’s will for both our lives and the Love He’s shared with both of us.

Too often, I’ve been so damned blinded by the light I forget where the hell I was driving to in the first place.

I’ve mistaken brass for gold far more often than I’d like to admit in a publicly-available forum. And Clive is right when he calls the confusion for good over great, “a fiercer devil.” It’ll fight for dear life because it knows it’s been discovered as fraudulent.

But let’s call it for what it is. I have no idea what Kim/Kris is thinking and I’m not going to pretend to know. I don’t know if Kim married because she thought it would bring tremendous ratings, if she’d fallen in love with someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, or some combination of the two. I don’t know what she’s feeling.

I do know what it feels like when what you thought to be Love isn’t love at all.

And I know what it feels like to let that go.

Part of me wishes I’d stuck to the original plan and just made fun of her. It sure as hell would’ve been funnier. And I wouldn’t feel the need to pray for her heart and mine as well.

But out with it. Out with it and to prayer we go.

VI

I had the honor and privilege of traveling up to Portland a few weeks ago for a wedding. The bride and groom asked me to read a passage from C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity.”

The passage began as follows:

“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it.  You cannot make it the basis of a whole life.  It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling.  Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.  Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.”

I know what you’re thinking: This is an awesome way to start a wedding. “You cannot make it the basis for a whole life…feelings come and go.”

This is the part where Kim Kardashian and I sit in the back of the chapel, feeling absolutely bummed out about our chances to find anything resembling honest and redeeming Love.

Then follows the part that forces Kim and I to make a choice:

“But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.  Love in this second sense – love as distinct from “being in love’ – is not merely a feeling.  It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.  They can have this love for each other even at moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.  They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else.  ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity:  this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.  It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

The passage is a complete picture of Love, not the brass often passed off as gold nowadays. It acknowledges that what started it cannot sustain it forever. But ‘being in love,’ that initial spark, creates the space for that quieter love, the engine that’ll take us day into day into day. It is a choice and commitment far beyond any initial feeling, a fact I find humbling and daunting.

But, and for a reason I can’t quite give shape to, I also find it hopeful.

I just hope Kim would find it hopeful as well.

VII

My roommate came home after work and told me he had to read aloud this section of a book he’s been working through, Cold Tangerines. He stands at the dining room table and reads:

There are things that happen to us, and when they happen, they give us two options. Either way, we will never be the same, and we shouldn’t.

These things can either strip us down to the bone and allow us to become strong and honest, or they can be the reasons we use to behave poorly indefinitely, the justification for all manner of broken relationships and broken ideals.

It could be the thing that allows everything else to turn, that allows the lock of our lives to finally spring open and our pent-up selves to blossom like preening flowers. Or it can be the reason we use to justify our anger and the sharp tones in our voices for the rest of our lives…

You know that feeling when you see the road made clear? When the fog lifts and instead of seeing five-hundred feet, you see for miles and miles ahead of you?

It is, for me, realizing that Love, Reconciliation and Tenderness were forces far beyond what I could create or conceive, that I have so much more to learn about them, but there is Grace and encouragement in the sight of God.

I don’t have any grand last words concerning Kim Kardashian, other than I hope she never makes another sex tape and embraces the idea that Love might not be what she thought in her head, that we’re all learning, and that there’s something far beyond what we could create or conceive.