Jane Eyre

My wife and I recently celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. It's been a great 10 years, even when things haven't been euphoric. Today, my wife quoted me a passage from Jane Eyre that is stunning in its beauty. The following is the character Jane Eyre talking about her husband, Mr. Rochester:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result. (p. 454)

It is hard to believe that an expression this moving and eloquent can ever actually be lived by real people. Humans are humans after all, full of faults, foibles, and frustrations. Yet, I am indeed supremely blessed by the gift of my wife, and while our concord is not always 'perfect', God's perfect superintending of our lives makes it difficult to flatly say that our concord is altogther imperfect either. Perfection is a tricky thing, and I have long struggled with a biblical definition of it. As I wrote in one of my published papers, perfection does not entail the erasure of scars, but the glorification of them. My wife and I both brought scars into our marriage, and like virtually everyone, we have occasionally scarred each other. But the redeeming of those scars through love, forgiveness, gratitude, and sacrifice makes our concord perfect. We display our scars to each other without shame, just as Christ did in John 20, and we love each other scars and all. Language is indeed inadequate to capture this kind of redemption.