30 Years with the Same Woman

Thirty years ago today, Yvonne and I stood together at the front of the church, in many ways still children, and made enormous and improbable promises to each other, in front of God and these witnesses, in the time-honoured tradition of those entering into the state of marriage. We really didn't know what we were getting into, although it seemed at the time that everyone, including us, understood exactly what marriage was. Today, on the other hand, it seems that there is little, if any, agreement on just what marriage actually is — but that's another subject for another post.

One might think that 30 years of living together on a daily basis — in each other's face morning and night, as it were — would be ample time to learn to know one another. And so it has — in some senses, at least. And yet, it seems more and more obvious that there is always much much more to know in order to truly know someone. Indeed, I've come to the conclusion that complete and exhaustive knowledge is foundationally impossible when it comes to knowing a person — if every one arrives at a place where there is no more to know than what is and has been known, then it is no longer the person that one knows, but something else — some thing else.

If this is true of knowing a human person, how much more must it be true of knowing God. The more we come to know God, the more we must be aware that God is so much more than we can know. Conversely, the closer we come to knowing all there is to know about God (as we may suppose we know), the more it is not God at all that we know.

This is, I suppose, why I intuitively have great difficulty with those Christian traditions that seem to have everything figured out; whose theology is neat, tidy and complete — among such groups I feel that it is no longer God that is being known, but something else — some thing else.

In thinking of these things, however, I am also reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's reason for refusing to believe in God. Sartre understood God as a being that had complete and exhaustive knowledge of every aspect of creation — including human beings, and most importantly including Jean-Paul Sartre. But so long as such a God existed, Jean-Paul Sartre could not himself exist as a person, only as a thing. And this he found intolerable. As, I imagine, would I.

Yet it is in God that I actually find my true home, my true personhood. Somehow God's knowledge of me — as extensive as it is, and certainly more extensive than my own knowledge of myself — does not reduce me to a thing, but rather elevates me to a person. Somehow God chooses to know me personally rather than impersonally, subjectively rather than merely objectively — somehow God grants to me the grace of being, to some degree and in some sense at least, unknowable, even to Him. In other words, God grants me personhood by choosing not to know me exhaustively as an object, but non-exhaustively as a person.

Today I am known more completely by Yvonne than by anyone else, and yet she continues to stick with me in spite of my many faults and the many times and ways I violate her own personhood — and perhaps more importantly, she still believes that there is more to me than she has yet known, just as I most certainly believe about her. It is an amazing thing. And yet not nearly so amazing as the way God sticks with me over even longer than 30 years, after even greater depth of knowledge of who I am and have been and have done and after an even greater degree of violation by me of His personhood. God, who knows me better than I know myself and who knew me even before I was born, still believes that there is more to me than has been seen, and is determined that we shall discover it together.

This is indeed a day to celebrate and be glad.