REASON TOGETHER

Currently under construction in Daytona Beach, Florida is a development called Latitude Margaritaville. When it’s finished next year, it will have about 7,000 homes available to buyers 55 or older. This isn’t a new concept; gated communities for seniors have been around for a while. What sets Margaritaville apart is that it is (to quote the press release) “an immersive brand experience.” It’s being designed and built so that fans of Jimmy Buffett (who, I regret to inform you, call themselves “parrotheads”) can live out their days as Buffett intended.

If you’re like me, news of Margaritaville results in conflicted feelings. On the one hand, you wish the future residents of this place no ill will. You don’t believe that they will be doing anything wrong by living there. You hope they’ll enjoy the sun, the shmaltz, and the presumably endless looping of Buffett’s ode to lost salt shakers. Yet, you sense that there’s something creepily dystopian about the whole enterprise.

Buffett’s song, which was recorded in the late 70’s, evoked a certain lifestyle. Indeed, it offered a vision of the good life. It painted the picture of a man who had abandoned the respectability of the American dream to become a beach bum, subsisting on sponge cake and boiled shrimp. He’s an anti-hero who by his authenticity has transcended the tourists whom he views from his front porch.

Undoubtedly, this song has provided a pleasant escape for many people. It has been the occasion for insurance adjusters in Phoenix and dental assistants in Houston to imagine themselves with sand in their toes and drinks in their hands, answering to no one but themselves. And, after a few decades of punching a clock and diverting funds to their 401Ks, they are finally ready to make their dreams a reality.

So it feels a bit mean to state the obvious. The future residents of Margaritaville are not countercultural beach bums who’ve checked out of the rat race. Instead, they are pliant consumers, signing on the dotted line in exactly the manner that Minto Communities LLC (the development company behind Margaritaville) predicted they would.

Of course, such a phenomenon is not unique to parrotheads (it is genuinely painful for me to type that word). Plenty of us express a toothless rebellion through consumption. Businesses like Hard Rock Cafe and Hot Topic have long offered counterculture as a commodity, The Ramones have sold more t-shirts than albums, and the author of this post, who will never attempt an ascent of Half Dome, is currently wearing a The North Face shirt.

The existence of Margaritaville raises a few interesting questions. For instance, what is the meaning of place in such a development? What are the pros and cons of “an immersive branding experience” as compared to a traditional community? But I’ll leave those questions to you and attempt an answer at another. What does Margaritaville tell us about the human experience?

Life can be difficult, even for people who have it relatively easy. As kids, we imagined that adulthood equaled freedom. But upon arrival we learn that there are consequences to eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much, and not exercising enough. We worry about our kids, our jobs, and that knocking sound coming from the car’s engine.

What if our interests and hobbies are, in part, ways of coping with the weight of responsibility? What if record collections, sports fanaticism, and cosplay conferences are valuable chiefly for the existential comfort they provide? Understood in this way, the differences between (for instance) the urban hipster and the resident of Margaritaville are minor. We may not identify with either one of them, but we can sympathize with them both.

I have recently felt sympathy for an adulterous woman. Such feelings are ill advised, I know. Proverbs says that the adulterous woman is bitter as gall and that her house is a highway to the grave. It says to stay away from her. Yet I can’t help being drawn in as I read Melissa Matthewson’s recent essay, On Coupling.

My sympathy is partially due to the quality of Matthewson’s writing. She weaves autobiography, confession, and zoological reflection together in a way that feels at once sober and urgent. Yet her intentions are plain. “I don’t want to follow the rules of marriage, of monogamy.”

She proposes open marriage to her husband, who is uninterested. “He muses over my idea that maybe we aren’t meant for one person. He doesn’t agree. He wants only me.”

Matthewson is careful not to present her husband as the problem. She describes him as loyal, steadfast, hardworking, and accommodating. “I think of my husband’s identity, unwavering in his love, his steady focus on work, on pleasing everyone but himself. I think, He’s selfless. And I’m not.”

Her issue, rather, is that domesticity has become a trap. Married life is a pallid imitation of what she’d hoped it would be. She mourns the loss of passion and “how domesticity might drown your identity.” She expresses apathy towards the mundane realities of housekeeping. “I don’t like doing dishes,” she says. “I’m not interested in how a vacuum works.”

It would be easy to dismiss Matthewson’s complaints as selfish, to condemn her with a ready-made script. For instance, to point out that she made a commitment to her husband, and that her kids need their mom. Or to tell her to stop complaining, act like an adult, and do what’s right.

In fact, I hope she knows someone that she trusts, who is wise, who can say something like that to her. But I doubt it would do much good for me to rail against this stranger. Instead, I’d like to point out something curious.

The woman in this essay is, to use the currently ubiquitous phrase, privileged. She has travelled internationally, earned multiple advanced degrees, and found myriad outlets for her creative energies. Her website says that she is a farmer, a writer, and a dance instructor who runs an organic market. In short, she is not living the life that Betty Friedan warned us about.

Despite this, she is unfulfilled. She suspects that there is something more to being human than her domestic life offers. “Everywhere I go….I judge the nature of married couples, believe they aren’t subversive enough, their lives too ordinary.” She reminds me of the character from Tolstoy’s short story, Family Happiness.

I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

Privilege seems largely to be a term of dismissal. We are assured that anyone to whom that pejorative has been applied can be safely ignored. Yet, the privileged are able to consider the ways in which life, even at its best, is unsatisfactory. Those who lack basics such as food and safety are likely to focus their efforts on satisfying those necessities. Such efforts leave little time for nursing a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

The French philosopher Rene’ Girard stated the phenomenon in this way, “once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don’t know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them.” Indeed, Matthewson desires intensely. She articulates that desire well, giving voice to a profound human need. But her solution to that need is tragic insofar as it is damaging to herself and her family and hopeless to satisfy her.

(Here I am making assertions rather than arguments. I am claiming that infidelity damages the person who commits it as well as the person against whom it is committed. Further, I am claiming that it isn’t a sufficient response to longing. I believe such assertions are defensible, though it is not now my task to defend them.)

Perhaps caution would seem like the proper Christian response to longing. Don’t take it too seriously, and maybe it will go away. Such a path may seem prudent, but Augustine took a different approach. In a homily on the first epistle of John, the great African theologian claimed that, “the whole life of a good Christian,” consists of desire. God alone can satisfy our longings, and so he reasoned that those longings ought to be taken seriously.

I am confident that Matthewson’s experiment will fail. Humans are not so simple as to have their longings satisfied by promiscuity. Yet, to say so is no indictment of longing. Rather, it is a call to reject insufficient answers to our longing. “Let us desire therefore, my brethren, for we shall be filled.”

I would like to say a word against preachers tweeting. But before I do, I have two things that I need to disclose. 1.) I occasionally preach at Denton Community Church.  2.) I am on Twitter as @bwdaskam. I make no claim as to the quality of the sermons, but my tweets are indisputably of the highest order.

Given my tendency to both tweet and preach, I might seem like a surprising source for this argument. But I’ll ask you to reserve your accusations of hypocrisy for just a moment. It’s a particular kind of tweet that I’m against, and one of which I believe myself to be innocent. Yet I think this argument is worth making, even if I am skewered by it.

Preachers are often the source of ridiculous tweets. On such occasions, rather than instantly publishing their inner thoughts, these pastors would do better to write them in a small notebook and then cast that notebook into a live volcano.

I don’t know much about the author of this tweet. From his profile I glean that he is a pastor and the author of a book. For all I know, he composed this tweet as the result of losing a bet.

There are some preacher tweets that are simply baffling. Just brief, confusing statements that make you wish there was some kind of context to explain them.

It is no longer sufficient?

I wish someone could “explain” those quote marks to me and then rewrite that sentence.

I do know a little bit about the authors of the above tweets. For one thing, they are both significantly smarter than I am. Also, they could come out with a line of asbestos cigarettes marketed toward babies and still be more pious than me. But those positive qualities don’t seem to help them much once they log onto www.twitter.com.

Other preacher tweets are, well, just look…

Forgiveness Man, a little-known super hero with zero fighting skills, has the power of absorbing pain

I want Coach Taylor to yell this at me so that I can be inspired and confused at the same time.

Honestly, I’m just glad that hashtag was outside of the quotation.

It’s easy enough to find a few cringe-worthy tweets from pastors, but there’s a problem here that goes beyond the quality of the composition. It isn’t just bad preacher tweets that deserve opprobrium, I believe. It’s this whole class of newly-minted spiritual maxims that have been released upon the world.

Note that I’m not saying preachers should all delete their accounts. By all means, I hope they’ll tell us jokes, recommend albums, and point us to articles. The problems start when they try to give pastoral guidance via Twitter. Here, in under 140 characters, is my thesis: ‪Preachers who tweet in this way degrade themselves, their audience, and the venerable tradition of short writings.‬

The tweeting preacher is engaged in a sort of shotgun discipleship wherein random bits of advice and insight are sent forth to no one in particular. I think we’ve failed to notice the oddity of this situation. Consider, for instance, the word, “follow.”

Following a preacher on Twitter requires much less commitment than that term normally implies. Sancho Panza put up with many indignities to follow Don Quixote. Yet, the modern Christian can “follow” all of their favorite preachers without the slightest difficulty. Having done so, they get to enjoy an endless stream of pithy insights. In a reversal of the normal order, followers sit in judgement of leaders. They show approval through likes and retweets; disapproval through muting, unfollowing, or simply ignoring.

Meanwhile, the daily exhortations that were once the province of the community have been outsourced to a group of self-styled thought leaders. The resulting unemployment is barely noticed. Instead of breaking bread with a fellow churchman, the follower can subsist on the intravenous drip of advice coming from his or her phone.

Perhaps I seem to be overstating things. After all, it’s true that readily-accessible opinions are as old as the Reformation. The success of that movement depended on the printing press and the pamphlets it could produce. Is Twitter really any different than books, blogs, podcasts, and recorded sermons? Since there’s nothing new under the sun, is Twitter particularly worthy of criticism?

Indeed it is, just as each of those other forms of communication deserve thoughtful critique. One difficulty that Twitter introduces is a lack of context. For instance, when Luther is quoted as saying that, “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe,” we understand that quote in light of a context that is indispensable to understanding its meaning. This isn’t some koan that’s offered to the world apropos nothing.

Of course, Twitter did not invent short writings. The book of Proverbs is a canonical collection of pithy sayings. The first century stoics were fond of aphorisms. Pascal had his pensees, Nicolás Gómez Dávila his scholia, and Nietzsche his aphorismen. And contemporary gnomists such as Nassim Taleb and Sarah Manguso continue to work within the genre.

It would be charitable to imagine that the clamorous din of preacher tweets signals a great renewal of aphoristic writing. Yet, the evidence leaves little room for optimism. As Manguso put it, “The brevity of fragments, scraps, the collective brain lint of the internet, is one thing; the brevity of the best aphorisms, which are complete in themselves, quite another.”

My wish is that preachers who have conceived of a brilliant little apercu would do one of two things. Either share it with some particular individual who is in need of its specific message, or  jot it down in a notebook away from public view. Doing so may not bolster the preacher’s personal brand, but it’s a small step towards greater dignity.

I have a pet theory that I like to call “The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance.” Despite that ridiculous name, or possibly because of it, I often find myself trying to explain this theory to friends, family members, and unsuspecting passersby. This doctrine concerns the individual and how he or she relates to the rest of society.

According to the doctrine, the individual is a storehouse of great wealth and potential. Each person carries about in his or her bosom an inherent luminescence, an inchoate genius. The wider world, and the people and systems that comprise it, are judged by their ability to recognize and nurture this spark.

Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon

It’s always been inside of you, you, you

And now it’s time to let it through-ough-ough

– Firework, Katy Perry

Perhaps Maslow is partially to blame for this, considering the exalted position he gave to self-actualization. John Locke may also bear some guilt, since he seems to have saddled us with the heavy burden of pursuing our individual happiness (so long as we don’t trample the rights of our neighbor). But no philosopher or theologian is likely to take credit for the doctrine in its popular form. If The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance had a creed, it would go something like this:

• I am the great protagonist of history.
• Everyone who lives and who has ever lived and who ever will live are supporting characters and extras in my story.
• My successes and failures are of utmost significance, the things upon which angels long to look.
• The world is just and good exactly to the extent that it rewards me.
• My greatness is intrinsic to my nature. I was born with it. It is not dependent upon displays of talent, ability, and goodness.
• My inner brilliance deserves to be recognized. Money, fame, and romantic attention are all acceptable forms of recognition.
• People who encourage me are good. They are on the right side of history.
• People who criticize me are bad. They are either usurpers or presumptuous in the extreme.
• Whatever shortcomings I have are adorable foibles and only add to my mystique.
• Whatever talents I have are profound and whoever beholds them is lucky beyond comprehension.
• My current position in the world is insufficient. My territory must be increased.

You have probably heard the hymns of this doctrine. You have seen the movies and the TV shows in which our protagonist, simply by being our protagonist, deserves to have every dream come true. One outworking of the doctrine is evident in the live’s of the world’s least happy people.

THE LEAST HAPPY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

As Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, explained in a lecture at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival, statistically speaking, the least happy people in the world are 45 year old men. What is it about middle age men that are so sad?

“What you find out about the guys who are 45 and they’re having a hard time is basically this; when you’re in your 20s and you’re in your 30s…life and its goals are actually simple. You want to do better, you want to be happier, you want to be more successful, hit the gas on your career. Make more money, get the promotions….”

“And things are great and that seems to work. And then guys hit their mid-40s and they say, whoa, I’m on the wrong road. I mean, this superhighway I’ve been cruising down, I don’t want to be on this highway, I want to be on a road that I chose. I want to be on that little dirt road over there, right? There’s a guy on it, on a motorcycle, okay? No helmet, okay? I want to be that guy. I mean, he’s doing it his way. He chose that little road. I want to be that guy.”

The modern career has a built-in mechanism for the display of inner brilliance. Work hard and you can ascend. (I’m not saying that every person who works hard is doing so to reveal his or her inner brilliance. You, reader, as surely not guilty of this. I’m really talking about other people.)

But, as demonstrated in Mr. Brook’s quote, career success can begin to feel a bit flimsy in middle age. So, is there a better way to understand ourselves as humans? I believe there is. But be warned, things are about to get religious.

CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY & INNER BRILLIANCE

It is possible to discuss meaningfully the subject of good work (or education for it) only by first clarifying the questions What is man? Where does he come from? What is the purpose of his life? – E.F. Schumacher

The foundational intuition of The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance is that people matter. Not simply “mankind” as a class, but individual men and women. We know that we are significant, even if we can’t tell you why. This is where the doctrine starts, and “by mixing a little truth with it, they had made their lie far stronger.”

Human beings made by God and in His image is the foundation of Christian anthropology. We are a special part of creation. Humans matter, and our significance isn’t a result of our talents or abilities. And because this is true, humans have a dignity that does not depend of their size, net worth, or political value.

The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance and Christian anthropology both agree that humans are important. But while the Christian derives that importance from the fact that he or she bears the image of God, The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance looks to the unique essence of the individual.

Christian thought also differs from The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance in how it treats others. According to the doctrine, life is a struggle to assert my own preeminence. Other people tend to be a hinderance in that struggle insofar as they are also self-centered. In contrast, the ideal of Christian fellowship consists in seeing others as fellow recipients of grace. Rather than struggling against them, we are called to struggle with them. As Bonhoeffer said, “It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Christian faith and The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance are at odds about the very purpose of life. The latter seeks to bring honor and glory to the self. However noble the means may appear, the end is nothing more than pride. But for the Christian, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We are taught in the Lord’s prayer to seek the glory of God, the Kingdom of God, and the will of God. And so, in a surprising and paradoxical way, we find our true end by abandoning the attempt to glorify ourselves.

Last week I had the chance to talk with Wes Crawford about his history in music, his thoughts on worship, and his upcoming album. Unlike your meandering existence, this interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 

How did you initially get into music?

Music was always a part of my life. My mom, starting in 4th grade made me take 3 years of piano lessons. After that I could choose to quit if I wanted to. And I did. I quit as soon as the three years were over.

There was a lady up the street from my house in Arlington who taught me. She had three pianos in her living room, and our piano lessons were purely for fun. They weren’t oriented towards a competition. So in my earliest memories, music wasn’t a means for advancement. It wasn’t about proving myself. It was purely about learning music for the fun of it.

I quit the piano lessons in 7th grade and immediately joined the school band. I had a leg up on the other kids because I could read music and knew a bit of music theory. I choose trumpet because we happened to have a trumpet in the house. In high school I played trumpet in the jazz band, which I loved. I was pretty good at it. I actually made lead in the Texas all-state jazz band my senior year. So it made sense for me to go to UNT and play music.

My natural talent got me pretty far, but I never really had the intense work ethic that a professional musician needs to have. And it was at that point that I started getting involved with Denton Bible Church and working on ministry. So, just as I was starting to run up against my limits in the UNT jazz program, I was more and more interested in ministry.

 

You and I first met you when you were leading worship at Denton Bible Church. As a worship minister, who was influencing you at that time?

Well, I’ve never had any formal training as a worship pastor. I remember asking John Bryson, who was leading Denton Bible’s college ministry at the time, “who are the worship leaders around the country that I should be learning from?” And he admitted that he didn’t know of anything or anyone that I should talk to. As a result, I had to go find people who were doing interesting things.

The Passion movement was gaining steam at the beginning of my career as a worship pastor. And I believe they started with a healthy re emphasis that was centered on God. They were talking about God as “the famous one.” But that movement suffered from a strange self-consciousness in later years.

I was reading John Piper at the same time, who was a huge influence. And I was in reading groups with John Brown where we would go through these classic writings by Christians from previous centuries. I also started listening to Kevin Twit and Indelible Grace, and that was a key point theologically for me. I had learned so much at Denton Bible, and I was beginning to grasp the functional centrality of the gospel – that the death and resurrection of Jesus was the center point of theology. And I began to understand how worship ministry fit into that – how we are formed by the words that we’re singing.

 

Did you plan to have a career as a worship minister?

No, as I started getting into ministry, I always assumed that I would be a Bible teacher. I thought music was just how God brought me to Denton, but that I would get my degree, play music as my hobby, but then move on. But as I’m going through these various states of ministry, I keep getting asked to lead worship. And even though I didn’t have a clearly articulated vision of what music ministry was for, I intuited that there was something important about it. I loved the words of the hymns we were singing, and I knew that they were important.

So I was leading worship for the college ministry at Denton Bible, and around that time I was also asked to lead worship at a church in Sherman. The church had an older congregation, and they felt strongly that there should be a piano. It was ok if I wanted to play my acoustic guitar, but there had to be a piano as well. This introduced an important learning experience for me, because my piano player was an older woman named Pat. Working with Pat, I had to learn – on the fly – how to play out of the hymn book in a way that worked. I had to take my skills and Pat’s skills and put those together in a way that made sense. It was a great education for me.

 

And from Denton you moved to Mexico?

Yes, as a missionary, and I really thought “I’m done with music. Now I’ve grown up. I’m going to start big boy ministry. I’m going to administrate BTCP [a Bible training program for pastors] around the country. I’ll do some teaching and I’m going to sit in with the elders and help them with strategy for the church, and things like that. Maybe I’ll get involved with the band, but music is really in my past.” And when I got down there, the first thing they said to me was, “hey, we need somebody to lead worship.” Ha! And so I led worship. In Spanish. And that wasn’t a frustration, really. It was just different than what I’d expected.

About a year before I arrived the church really didn’t have any musicians. And there was a sweet working-class family in the church who saw that need and determined to meet it. This family lived out in the western suburbs of Monterrey where they had two four wheelers. And when they saw this need in the church, they said, “we’re going to sell our four wheelers and buy instruments and get ourselves in lessons and we’re going to meet this need.” And that’s what they did. Out of that family, I had a drummer, a singer, I had an 11 year old piano player and a bass player. And that was my band, essentially.

So again, this is another scenario where week to week I have to figure out how to put something together that makes sense. And that was a great experience for me to work with people’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses and make something good for the church. That was very formative for me and the way I approach leading a worship band. I’m not trying to imitate some popular worship band. I’m trying to work with the people I have with me that morning.

 

And did you carry that philosophy with you when you moved to Kansas City?

Leading worship at Redeemer in Kansas City was certainly different. We had a lot more musicians, and we had a long list of songs that we played. But, yes, the philosophy was the same. If you’re the kind of worship leader who goes into a Sunday with a target in mind. “I want it to sound like this.” That’s one way to go. But I firmly believe, from my jazz education as well as my theological background, that I should look around each Sunday, and say, “who have I got here. What can we create with this group of people that’s beautiful?” I just want to assemble musical personalities and let those personalities come through.

 

So, tell me about the record. Why did you choose to record these Nathan Partain songs?

I think I have a skill as a curator. We did a lot of songs at Redeemer. Probably too many. Nathan’s songs stood out to me because they go right to the heart of theology. They go to the heart of the gospel and press into it in ways that you just don’t find songs doing very often.

Also, I get the sense that he’s writing from the experience of his community and for a congregation. The songs we’ve done on the record are the ones that gave voice to some specific ways our own congregation was experiencing God’s grace and became favorites for our church.

You know, the enemies of good art and of beauty are more than just laziness. Sentimentality is an enemy. The desire for everything to appear perfect all the time is an enemy. There’s a slickness, or a sheen—trying to recreate the perfection you see on television, or trying to make something that is ready to be mass-marketed—that is sadly becoming the norm in most churches. I say it’s sad because it tends to obscure the humanity involved. At Nathan’s church they have a stated goal of cultivating a culture of art patronage; that is, of not only valuing beauty but also its creation by and for people. Somehow the fact that these songs were written for a specific group of people made them easy for us to relate to as well. And I tried to capture that sense of community on the record.

________________________________________

 

You can learn more about Wes’ album by visiting his Kickstarter campaign.

Your spouse has sent you the following message:

 

Question: What does it mean?

1. It is literal. Your spouse hopes to speak with you.
2. It is conciliatory. You had a fight earlier, and he/she would like to patch things up.
3. It is aggressive. You had a fight earlier, and he/she would like to continue it.
4. It is seductive. “Talk” is a euphemism.
5. None of the above.

Why should this message require interpretation in the first place? It’s not as though the message is complex. No, indeed it is a plain enough sentence. The issue is that the people involved are complex. Maybe if humans were simpler we wouldn’t have to work to understand each other. We could take in messages like a computer receives data. We’d have no need for a hermeneutic – a way of understanding the words and glances that pass between us.

A hermeneutic is like an interpretive filter, and you don’t have to know the word to master the skill. As advertisements and talking points fill the air around us, we constantly filter them without a conscious thought. One such filter has been called the “hermeneutic of suspicion.” We protect ourselves by casting a suspicious eye at news headlines, marketing messages, and (especially) the pronouncements of our political enemies. We need this protection. Without it we would be forever duped, clicking links to learn the one weird trick for curing diabetes.

And yet the armor that protects us from the world should be shed at the threshold of our homes. A hermeneutic of suspicion won’t do when speaking to the people we love. Still, we can’t dispense with interpretation altogether, even at home. Think of that text message. We still need some way to understand the people around us. So, what would happen if we traded a hermeneutic of suspicion for a hermeneutic of love?

Go ahead and check 1 Corinthians 13 if you like, but you probably already know how it works. Patience, kindness, and deference toward the beloved are the marks of love. This isn’t a checklist so much as a posture, a way of being.

The hermeneutic of suspicion takes every slight as an act of aggression. And there are no shortage of slights. Maybe your spouse makes you late, they fail to do a chore they said they’d do, or they frown at the meal you’ve just made. The hermeneutic of suspicion warns you not to let any insult pass unnoticed and unremarked upon. Your spouse is being unreasonable, it tells you, and you would be unreasonable to ignore it. And so you respond, not out of love, but out of self-defense.

Of course your spouse has a hermeneutic too. He or she will interpret your response. They can assume the best about you, extending patience, or they can be suspicious, mining the worst possible meaning from your words. If they opt for the latter, then the cycle continues and your home bristles with hurt feelings and hurtful words.

But the hermeneutic of love shows a more excellent way. Maybe one’s spouse has a valid reason for being late. And perhaps the time spent waiting could be profitably used. It’s easy to occasionally forget a task. Maybe you could gently remind them, or even do it yourself. And who doesn’t get fussy about food now and then? It’s a visceral reaction, not a judgement about the worth of the work you’ve done.

Employing a hermeneutic of love requires surrender. It demands that we give up the eternal struggle to be seen as the most correct, the most mistreated, or the least ridiculous. It requires the acknowledgement that the only way to “win” at marriage is as teammates rather than opponents. The alternative is to turn our families into “a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended,” as Wendell Berry put it.

The week of Valentine’s is a good opportunity to try out the hermeneutic of love. Commit to gracious and loving interpretations of your spouse for just a few days. I don’t doubt that it will be hard, but take heart. Love never fails.