See a Palace Rise From a Two-Room Flat

It astonishes me to imagine the way my life will change when the time comes to bind it with another’s.  I just returned from seeing Up – a movie that, like all Pixar flicks surreptitiously do, caught me off guard with the profundity of its sweetness.  Pixar is the one company of which I am aware that can fill our hearts and televisions with purity, make us reflect on the deeper things, challenge our imaginations with creative nuance, and still rake in millions at the box office.  Ah, world, there is hope for you yet. 

The movie was about marriage.  It was about men and what they deeply want, women and their hidden longing, and the human need to – as George Bailey described to his blushing Mary – “lasso the moon” for his spouse. 

The film begins with a quick and silent montage that tells the story of an entire marriage, from beginning to end.  The couple meets as children when the gap-toothed redheaded girl steals the boy’s heart with her vivid imagination and thirst for adventure.  As the two marry and age, about ninety seconds of footage chronicle all of the dreams the couple shares through the decades.  Some are realized, but most are not.  The man seems not to notice his wife age a day until all of the sudden she is expiring, and he is caught unawares by her sudden inability to realize the adventures they’d imagined in their youth. 

He is torn to pieces because he could never seem to make the adventure come together for her.  She had dreamt as a girl of building a house in the jungle of South America, so he sets out to grant her childhood dream after she has passed away.  He will stop at nothing to accomplish this for his bride. 

And this is the characteristic common to all men.  It is manifested in myriad ways, but men all ache to build and create, travel and accomplish, see, do, climb, and conquer – but all for the sake of the queen whose heart they covet, worked for, have sworn to protect, and, above all, love with every fiber of their being.  Men want the world for their wives. 

I saw the movie with my brother and father.  They grimaced as they watched as the husband in the film had to spend their waxing “adventure fund” on automotive repairs, to fix the leaky roof, etc.  It killed them to watch this man finally decide to take his wife to the Amazon, only to find she was unable to make the trip.  What marvelous men I live with. 

And now to women.  After he has finally accomplished his goal and physically transplanted their house to the specific place in the jungle his wife imagined as a girl, he finds a notebook of hers with new pictures inserted in the “adventures I’m going to have” section she began as a kid.  In it are pictures of their wedding, little road trips they took, nights in the family room, mornings reading by the front windows, weekends doing yard work.  These were the adventures she dreamt of.  Loving him, building a life with him, putting personal touches on their quirky house – that was the adventure of her life.  She liked to let her imagination run wild on the precipices of rushing waterfalls and in the verdant roots of steamy jungle floors, but her heart was not tied to these. 

And this is what women give: they deal tenderly with the dreams of their men.  They give him a soft place to land after he spends his day climbing, striving, building.  Don’t get me wrong – women certainly do these things too, often to a greater degree, but this is how I perceive the roles when the workday is over, the front and back doors are locked for the night, and the household is quiet.  Women see the fulfillment and adventure in building things that sometimes appear quiet and plain, but hold all the meaning our blink of life can contain.  A man wants to give his wife the world.  But a woman knows she already possess it because she has a man who will labor for a lifetime to give it to her. 

It’s stated well in that beautiful song from Cabaret:

“How the world can change

It can change like that,

Due to one little word: marriage. 

 

See a palace rise

From a two-room flat,

Due to one little word: marriage. 

 

And the old despair

That was often there

Suddenly ceases to be. 

 

For you wake one day,

Look around, and say,

‘Somebody wonderful married me.’”

 

Perhaps this will be for me someday, perhaps it won’t.  This discussion interests me as it concerns the comparison in the Bible between a good marriage and the relationship between Christ and man.  The bride-groom relationship is just like the man-God relationship in this respect, and in many others. 

The male and female roles described above coexist perfectly within the person of Christ.  On one hand, Jesus is the comforter, the one who reminds us of our constant fulfillment within his love for us.  When our dreams don’t pan out and the world disappoints us (as is nearly always does), Christ is there to present the eternal truths of love, joy, hope, and peace as reminders that all is well in spite of our frustrating circumstances.  And yet he is also there with us as we cling to rocky mountain faces, racing toward our high-dollar dreams.  He encourages us to take adventures, he blesses our petitions, he created this endless universe for us to explore, dominate, enjoy, and use.  And he longs to give it to us, to grant us our every wish, to love and nurture us, his bride. 

In Christ, as in a good marriage, we inherit the palace of God’s kingdom, be it indeed a castle on a cloud or, simply put, a two-room flat.