Weekend Reads: Of marriage and fairy tales

A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

By Gary Thomas

“I think Gary Thomas understands marriage better than the Apostle Paul did,” my brother-in-law told me last week. Readers of A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together? (David C Cook, 2014) may tend to agree.

Thomas is a little single-minded in his pursuit of the kingdom of God. Romance is great. Gimmicks are fine. But they won’t keep a marriage alive. In fact, only an obsession with the glory of God is enough for true love.

Did you ever realize that your spouse is God’s child, thus making God your Father-in-law? Do you live today in light of the coming Day of Judgment? Do you live to give, or live to get? As Thomas argues, our cultural view of marriage is absurd. A good marriage isn’t something you find, but something you make. This is why “serial monogamy” is so wrongheaded. If you live as a spider, sucking the life out of everyone around you, then you will never have a good marriage. It doesn’t matter how many different spouses you try. Rather, you have to work on making your marriage good. You do this by worshipping together, praying together, and by loving—that is, by always willing to do good to the other person. Carry out your marriage vows: “I do and I will, every day of our lives!”

If you have anything on your conscience, A Lifelong Love will make you wince. But it also offers hope, because what Thomas is after is a grace-driven life. Yes, we must be gracious. That’s the law. But it is the law of the Lamb of God, whose grace gives us grace and whose love for His bride makes our marriages possible. Thomas never loses sight of Him—and He definitely knows more about marriage than even St. Paul.

The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

By Charles Kingsley

What do you get when you cross George MacDonald with Lewis Carroll? The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, by Victorian clergyman Charles Kingsley (1819–75). Recently republished by Oxford University Press (2013), Water-Babies is highly fanciful and deeply practical.

The plot deals with Tom, a young chimney sweep who, after meeting a beautiful girl about his own age, falls into a stream and evolves backward into a water-baby. This is a creature very much like a land-baby, except that it lives under water and plays with other babies, all of whom are the under the management of the fairies. Two fairies in particular, the symbolism of whose names can hardly fail to escape the youngest reader, come into the story. These are the beautiful Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and her (at first glance) hideous sister Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, who is “as old as Eternity, and yet as young as Time.” Tom must go on a great quest to Shiny Wall and find Mother Carey, who will tell him how to go somewhere he doesn’t like and do something he doesn’t want to do in order to finally grow up.

Water-Babies’Victorian moralizing is more theological, and more practical, than that of many professedly didactic works: “He will tell you no fibs, my little man; for he is a Scotchman, and fears God, and not the priest.” Kingsley’s views on child-raising, too, are revolutionary: “But perhaps the way of beating, and hurrying, and frightening, and questioning, was not the way that the child should go, for it is not even the way in which a colt should go, if you want to break it in, and make it a quiet serviceable horse.” Meanwhile, beware the fate of the Doasyoulikes!

A merry heart does good like a medicine, and Kingsley had a merry heart. Reading him will give you one too.