Let Me Be a Woman (By Elisabeth Elliot) - Part IX

Let Me Be a Woman: Notes on Womanhood for Valerie

* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?


Chapter 44 Be a Real Woman

* The second thing that makes marriage work, the most explosively dangerous element in our human nature, the source of the greatest earthly pleasure - even, if you ask me, of the greatest fun - the thing you've been wondering when I'd get around to discussing, is sex.
What a real woman wants is a real man. What a real man wants is a real woman. It is masculinity that appeals to a woman. It is femininity that appeals to a man. The more womanly you are, the more manly your husband will want to be.

* We are not required somehow to "overcome" our sexuality. We affirm it. We rejoice in it. We seek to be faithful to it as we seek to use it as a gift of God. ... One, called to be a man, and another, called to be a woman, become one flesh in which, as one flesh, they become one with God.

* You are, Valerie, by the grace of God, a woman. This means you have responsibilities. You are fully a woman, and this means you have privileges. You are only a woman, which means that you have limitations. Walt is a man, he is fully a man, and he is only a man. Thank God for this, and live it to the hilt!

Chapter 45 The Courage of the Creator

* "Every good endowment that we possess and every complete gift that we have received must come from above, from the Father of all lights, with whom there is never the slightest variation or shadow of inconsistency."

Chapter 46 The Inner Sanctum

* God did not limit the gift of sexuality to those who He foreknew would marry. But the gift of sexual intercourse He ordained exclusively for those who marry. This is unequivocal in Scripture. There are no exceptions. Intercourse without total commitment for life is demonic. This supreme intimacy was mysterious ...

* No stronger language could have been found to denote the intimacy which exists between Christ and His Bride. Unquestionably it is because of these mysteries that physical union is reserved for husband and wife, two who have given themselves unconditionally to one another before God and the world. They enter into "knowledge" which no one else is permitted to enter. It is the inner sanctum of human knowledge. "And Abraham knew his wife."

* "If you get too technical you're going to miss the blessing." As with New Testament Greek, so with sex. Beware of the how-to-do-it books. There is danger in analysis. You can't learn the meaning of a rose by pulling it to pieces. You can't examine a burning coal by carrying it away from the fire. It dies in the process. There is something deadly about the relentless scientific probe into the mechanics of sexual activity - ... - to say nothing of the volunteers who participate in the collective experiments, willingly exhibiting themselves for the cause of science and reducing this precious gift not merely to banality but to a bodily function as devoid of meaning for the human being as it is for an animal.

* By throwing away the very things which guarded its meaning, we have thrown away the thing itself. What was once priceless is now the cheapest commodity on the market.

* The nudity is not supposed to move us. ... But I don't want to look at nudity without emotion. I want it reserved to enhance, not exhibited to destroy, the depth of individual experience. I feel I am being robbed of the incalculably valuable treasures of delicacy, mystery, and sophistication. Modesty was a system of protection. But the alarms have all been disconnected. The house is wide open to plunder.

* There is no longer a sense of occasion or appropriateness. What ought to be hidden is displayed. What ought to be whispered or covered in silence is shouted. What ought to be kept out for a chosen time, a chosen place, and a chosen individual is thrown out into the thoroughfare.
Sex is not the most important thing that makes a marriage work. But it is important. It has no authority of its own. It cannot lead to freedom. It must not control. It cannot finally fulfill. In love's highest ecstasies the lover knows that this is not all there is. The closest closeness is not close enough. The "I-Thou" that we ought was ultimate brings us ultimately to that other Thou. It is the will of God that leads to freedom. It is the will of God that finally fulfills. "The world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear, but the man who is following God's will is part of the permanent and cannot die."

* Read the beautiful Song of Songs, a love poem included in the inspired Word of God which describes the beauties of the lover in the eyes of the beloved, and of the beloved in the eyes of the lover. They saw each other. His head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his arms, his body, his legs, his appearance, his speech are all cited with rapture. "My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand." This woman had eyes to see, a heart to love, and the ability to put it into words.

* A wife needs eyes to see the man, in all his aspects, which God has given her. She needs a heart trained by practice to love him. She needs to be able to express what she sees and how she loves. We are human beings, made of flesh and blood as well as with brains and emotions. The Word had to be made flesh before we could truly understand what God was like. A man prefaces his proposal for marriage with a declaration of love - "In the beginning was the Word." He says it in as many ways as he can think of - words, gestures, looks, gifts, flowers. But it is not until he marries the woman that the word finally becomes flesh, and his love is expressed most fully. But then the flesh must once again become word. Both the woman and the man need to be told, and told again and again and again, that they are loved. "Behold, thou are fair, my love. There is no spot in thee." Word, then flesh, then word, and so on through life.

* The essence of sexual enjoyment for a woman is self-giving. Give yourself wholly, joyfully, hilariously. (Have we ever talked about the hilarity of sex? No one had prepared me for how rollicking it can be at times!) ... You will find that it is impossible to draw the line between giving pleasure and receiving pleasure. If you put the giving first, the receiving is inevitable.

There are times when you will find it impossible to give, and your husband, in love to you, does not demand. There are times when you will be ravenously hungry and he will want nothing so much as to go to bed and go at once to sleep. Your love, then, will want what he wants more than what you wanted yourself. This is another kind of giving.

You will want to bring forth, for your lover, your own treasures. They are not to be revealed ahead of time to him nor in retrospect to anyone else. These are your own gifts, unique and exceptional and not to be delivered over to the commonplace. Hold them sacred. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "My moments signed by God need not be appreciated in the market place."

It will not always be clearcut and simple. In this matter, as in all others where your life is bound closely to your husband's, you will sometimes be aware that you need help. Remember first that love itself - the "educated heart" - has a way of teaching you what to do. Worry is worse than useless, it's destructive. Paul wrote, "Don't worry over anything whatever, tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus." It's God who thought up sex. "Every detail of your needs" includes sexual ones. You can talk to Him about them. You can't shock or embarrass Him. "If any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God, who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty."

Chapter 47 Loyalty

* A third thing that makes marriage work, in addition to the acceptance of hierarchical order and the proper use of sex, is loyalty. Loyalty is based on pride, the right sort of pride that recognizes intrinsic worth in the country or institution or place or person which is the object of loyalty.

* When she takes her husband's name she consents to be known as his wife.

* Pride involves identity. You must identify yourself with someone in oder to be proud of him.

* This loyalty will bring you suffering. ... If you are proud of your man and loyal to him you will suffer when he is criticized. No man in a public position escapes criticism and you must stand by him when it comes. You will know sometimes that the criticism is a just one and because you are loyal you will suffer the more. You will be, by your identification with this man, included in the criticism.

When he fails you cannot be proud of his failure, but you can be loyal. You can maintain that faith in the idea that God had when He made him, and you can comfort and support him, giving him the strength of your love and the incentive which your pride in him will always instill.

Chapter 48 Love Is Action

* We would talk about the fourth thing - love. It is not fourth in priority. I have not arranged these in order of importance because, quite simply, I don't know how. The ideal marriage, I think, cannot do without any one of them. There must be acceptance of the hierarchical order, there must be sex, there must be loyalty and pride, and there must be, in and through all, love.

* The kind of love that makes a marriage work is far more than feelings. Feelings are the least dependable things in the world. To build a marriage on that would be to build a house on sand. When you promise, in the wedding ceremony, to love, you are not promising how you expect to feel. You are promising a course of action which begins on your wedding day and goes on as long as you both live.

Your feelings cannot help but be affected by riches and poverty, health and sickness, and all the other circumstances which make up a lifetime. Your feelings will come and go, rise and fall, but you make no vows about them. When you find yourself, like the unstable man in the Epistle of James, "driven with the wind and tossed," it is a great thing then to know that you have an anchor. You have made a promise before God to love. You promise to love, comfort, honor, and keep this man. You vow to take him as your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish "according to God's holy ordinance," till death parts you.

Not one of us can fully face up to all the details of the possibilities at the time we make these staggering promises. We make them in faith. Faith that the God who ordained that a man and woman should cleave together for a lifetime is the God who alone can make such faithful cleaving possible. We are not given grace for imaginations. We are given the grace needed at the time when it is needed, "this day our daily bread." And because you have given your word you have committed yourself once and for all. "This, by the grace of God, I will do." Nothing that has ever been worth doing has been accomplished solely through feelings. It takes action. It takes putting one foot in front of the other, walking the path you have agreed together to walk.

* The underlying principle of love is self-giving. It seems to that this is inevitable for a woman who truly loves. You already know how deeply, how urgently you long to give yourself to your husband. It is the essence of femininity to give. Perhaps it is more difficult for a man to give himself, but both husband and wife must learn this. In the wife, this takes the form of submission. ... When in the course of daily life the love which they so naturally feel for their husbands is not sufficient for the wear and tear, the action then required is submission.

But Paul knew that a man's love was of a different sort. His virile drive for domination, God-given and necessary in fulfilling his particular masculine responsibility to rule, renders it more difficult for him to lay down his life. So Paul imposed the heaviest burden on the man when he commanded him to love his wife as Christ loved the Church.

Chapter 49 Love Means a Cross

* The Cross must enter into marriage. "Who loveth sufferth too."

The Cross enters the moment you recognize a relationship as a gift. The One who gives it may withdraw it at any time, and, knowing this, you give thanks in the receiving. Desiring above all else to do the will of God, you offer back to Him this greatest of all earthly gifts as an oblation, lifted up in worship and praise, with faith that in the offering it will be transformed for the good of others.

This is what sacrifice means. This is why the Cross of Christ "towers o'er the wrecks of time." Love is sacrificial. Sacrifice is a giving, an offering up, and the meaning of sacrifice in the Bible is the giving of life to another.

* Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself. Childishness is characterized by self-centeredness. It is only the emotionally and spiritually mature who are able to lay down their lives for others, those who are "masters of themselves that they might be the servants of others."

* Christian love is action. It is the warp and woof of marriage, and because marriage itself is a life-work, this love is worked out through all the days and years of marriage, growing as it is practiced, deepening as cares and responsibilities deepen, and turning, at the same time, those cares and responsibilities (and even the drudgeries) into deeper joy.

* This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience - it looks for a way of being constructive. ... You can't, of course, be constructive if you don't perceive weakness. But when you recognize a place where a little construction or reinforcement is needed you can begin to build up, to encourage, to strengthen. Don't lose patience. Building takes a long time and you have to put up with many delays and inconveniences and a lot of rubble in the process.

* Love is not possessive. ... By remembering first that it is a gift, and second, by remembering the limitations of the gift. God has given you to each other in a particular way for a particular time. He is still Master of each of you, and it is first of all to Him that you answer. There is a possessiveness which is greed, a clutching, clinging lust that overwhelms and overpowers. There is no faith in this kind, no thanksgiving, no reverence for the person made in the image of God. He is treated as an owned object to be disposed of at the will of the owner. There is fear of loss - he might get away or be taken away. Trust the God who gave him to you, believe Him to keep you both.

* Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. ... You have already impressed him. You are enormously important to him. There is no question about that. Accept the fact and be at rest with him. Be meek, acknowledging that there are areas in his life where he can do without you.

* Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. ... not that she is helpless and in need of physical assistance, but that he cares about her. She is pleased to be recognized in these special ways, and he is pleased because she is pleased. It's a small price to pay for a warm feeling. It's another little tug on the cords that bind them together.

* Love is not touchy. Love is touched - that it is, it is deeply sensitive to the feelings of another, sad when he is sad, hurt when he is hurt, glad when he is glad. But love is not touchy. Touchiness refers to the reaction to another's treatment. When two people are living in love they operate on the assumption that love is at the bottom of whatever treatment they get. This eliminates a lot of potential hurts. It's true that it's always easier to hurt someone you love because everything you do and say matters so intensely to him. But to react in an injured way is touchiness. Love is not touchy. Love gives the benefit of the doubt. And ever if doubt persists, react in love. Don't pay back evil for evil.

* Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails. ... Love keeps a clean slate. This doesn't mean, of course, that it's possible to forget every offense. "To forgive is human, to forget divine." You may have to forgive him when he hurts you and then forgive him again and every single time you remember the offense even if it springs to mind four hundred and ninety times. You'll find that forgiveness is not nearly so much as a full-time joy as resentment.

* Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.

* You can't talk about the idea of equality and the idea of self-giving in the same breath. You can talk about partnership, but it is the partnership of the dance. If two people agree to dance together they agree to give and take, one to lead and one to follow. This is what a dance is. Insistence that both lead means there won't be any dance. It is the woman's delighted yielding to the man's lead that gives him freedom. It is the man's willingness to take the lead that gives her freedom. Acceptance of their respective positions frees them both and whirls them into joy.

* If you can understand your womanhood, Valerie, in this light, you will know fullness of life. Hear the call of God to be a woman. Obey that call. Turn your energies to service. Whether your service is to be to a husband and through him and the family and home God gives you to serve the world, or whether you should remain, in the providence of God, single in order to serve the world without the solace of husband, home, and family, you will know fullness of life, fullness of liberty, and (I know whereof I speak) fullness of joy.