She says it better than I could and Book Report #2

In the midst of my thoughts on marriage, I was reading a book about chastity - which in turn was a book on singleness, marriage, sin, grace, and Christian community. As I neared the end of the book, I had one of those "how did you get inside my head?" moments with the author, Lauren Winner. She somehow grabbed a hold of a few of the threads that had been flying around in my head, pulled them together, and braided them into a tight cord in a few articulate paragraphs. I feel compelled to share an excerpt here, because Winner wrote it so much better than I could at this point in time.

In the Christian grammar, marriage is not only for the married couple. Insofar as marriage tells the Christian community a particular story, marriage is also for the community. Marriage presupposes fidelity, and married people are a sign to the church of God's own radical fidelity toward all of us. He loves us, and is faithful to us, when we cheat on Him. He loves us, and is faithful to us, when we insist our love has died on the vine. Marriages are made in part to remind us of God's relentless fidelity.

And marriage tells the church about the communion and community that is possible between and among people who have been made new creatures in Christ. It hints at the eschatological union between Christ and the church. As ethicist Julie Hanlon Rubio has put it, "Marriage consists not simply or even primarily of a personal relationship. Rather, it crystallizes the love of the larger church community. The couple is not just two-in-one, but two together within the whole, with specific responsibility for the whole... They must persevere in love, because the community needs to see God's love actualized among God's people" (Real Sex, pg. 144).

"Marriage is also for the community." Yes! Marriage is for the community, because it gives this 24-year-old single girl a glimpse of God's relentless love and faithfulness that I might not be able to see on my own. Marriage is for the community, because a married couple who has committed their life to the Lord can serve him better as a team than either could as individuals (which is why God called them to be married). Marriage is for the community, because a diligently married couple shows us a human (and therefore still incomplete) picture of God's relationship with us.

And with that, my thoughts are - for now - a bit more complete, my mind a bit less restless. For that I am thankful. I am also thankful for intelligent writers and good books, especially those that speak to the questions rolling around in my mind, and even more so those that speak to questions that hadn't even started rolling around yet. Lauren Winner's books have done that for me. I've read two this summer (that may actually be all she's got right now): Girl Meets God and Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity. Girl is Winner's memoir of her journey from being an Orthodox Jew to becoming a Christian in general and Episcopalian in particular. Her Jewish roots help to illuminate some aspects of Christianity for her - and did the same for me as I read - and I appreciated her take on Episcopal traditions. Real Sex is a valuable work both because Winner talks frankly about the discipline of chastity and the role of sex and relationships in the lives of Christians, and because it is a book that is about so much more than sex. It is mainly directed towards young-ish singles, but I think it is worth reading for anyone, at any point. She'll make you laugh a little, and she'll make you think a lot. Let me know if you read anything of hers - I'd love to hear what you think!