Singleness and Bearing the Image of God

Singleness and

Bearing the Image of the God who is love

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I spend too much time on Twitter. But can you blame me? It is where I have found people who don’t have the same perspectives as I. My life has largely been one where in my mind I was pursuing theological wisdom. I often saw people who disagreed with my understanding of truth to be distractions from the search for truth. Being on Twitter has challenged conclusions I have assumed over a lifetime. I have gradually realized that all God-given theology is given for the purpose of shaping us into people who love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This means contrary to how I had understood life as a search for truth and those opposed to truth as distractions; that instead the search for truth is a search for understanding how to love, and that those who I thought were distractions were actually a part of the focus for which I had been called to seek truth.

            My particular focus in writing this blog is to address people who are single and would really like to be married. It is for those who are in this situation and for those who know such persons in this situation. I write not only for those who are single and have never been married but also for the wounded that have been married and now are single. Some have lost a spouse to death. Some were married and no longer are. Many of you were either wounded by betrayal or battle with a feeling of failure, and often you struggle with both. I am writing this for those of you who are single and for those of you who know such people. I was moved to write this blog in response to some quotes that I will summarize to protect anonymity. One of the quotes had to do with someone finding that she often wished for a husband because she thought life would be easier in many ways. At the same time she also realized she was an adult and didn’t she have the wherewithal to make simple decisions. In other words she wanted to beat herself over the head for yearning to be married, for understanding that some things would be easier if she were married, and for letting that hold her back from doing what she could do now. I think a lot of us as singles can relate the sort of painful self-analysis that says we are misfits living outside the norms of life, and we are misfits because we fail to make our misfit situations work. In such a state it is easy to imagine ourselves as hopeless persons imprisoned in our cells outside of ordinary life without reprieve. It is easy for a destructive self-condemnation cycle to take hold that will paralyze our lives to some degree.

            I do not feel particularly gifted to write to singles about the many nuances of singleness. I have been single all of my life and I am nearly sixty years old. But for the most part, all I know about singleness is from my own experience which is limited. I would recommend Sarah Thebarge’s blog spot as a good place to read some great articles on singleness. You can read her blogs at http://sarahthebarge.com/blog/  I especially loved this http://sarahthebarge.com/2015/01/if-singleness-is-necessity/. While you’re into reading stuff by Sarah, I still believe the most important book, (for me) that I read in 2014 was her book The Invisible Girls. It told of how she went to Portland, Oregon because it was about as far as she could go from what she had been dealing with on the east coast. She had felt invisible while suffering through cancer which was joined to being abandoned by a fiancé. Then in Portland while on a bus she met a family of invisible girls; a family with great needs who seemed invisible to those around them. Sarah Thebarge's helped me to begin to see that all around me are invisible people with invisible needs. Sometimes the greatest need is as simple as the need for someone to stand beside them with empathy and compassion.

            The only thing I offer to singles and those who know singles is a reminder of what it means for us to be human beings meant to bear the image of God. First, God created us in his image. Secondly, as St. John wrote “God is love.” This means that we were created in God’s image that we might love. This is agreeable to Christ’s teaching who summarized the giving of the law as the commands to love God with all heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love our neighbors as ourselves. So as you or someone you know struggles with singleness let this one truth sink deeply into your soul – You were made that you might love.

            This means that you should respect your desire to want to be married, to spend a lifetime loving someone, to beginning a family where you will bring new life into the world, to love and care for and seek to ready for a life of love to God and neighbor. Don’t belittle such a desire because you have responsibilities that somehow you feel you aren’t doing well so why should you have such dreams of marrying someone. Separate your abilities to do your responsibilities in your single life with your desire to marry. Accept that if you were married there would be some things easier and some things more difficult. But accept it as a given that because you were made in God’s image you were made to be one who loves.

            Let this thought be a pathway to your future. Love is a many-splendored thing. Love is faithful service to God. Love is the desire to do good to and for a neighbor. Love is the turning of a mundane task into a way of happily serving God and providing for the needs of others. Love is the appreciation of a beautiful sunrise so as to give God thanks for the sight, and to share it in a photograph on Facebook so others can share in the beauty you saw. Love is the remembrance that enemies are humans made in God’s image to be loved. Love is the remembrance of people who are despised for racial or ethnic reasons are just as much human beings as the people with whom we identify. We singles often face a certain kind of temptation. We feel imprisoned in a space of confinement looking through barred windows into what we imagine is ordinary lives, like the life lived by the people we imagine have what we desire to have; a nice residence, a nice spouse, handsome lively little children. We imagine that we are living in prisons we do not understand kept out of the life of love for which we yearn. But we are missing one form of love while many forms of love are yet available to us. Sometimes for those of us who are single, we can spend more time in some of these forms of love than any married person with children can spend. So learn to view singleness not only through what you haven’t been given, but by looking through the gates of opportunity to those forms of love which we can enter in these moments of our singlehood. The mistake we can so easily make is to imagine that life begins for us when we get at long last to fall in love and marry that special significant other.  But life does not begin at marriage. It began for us in the womb. Ever since then we have been participating in a journey. It has been a journey in which we were called to bear the image of the God who is love, by our learning to love. Life does not begin at marriage. Life has begun long ago and it is a journey of learning to love, and it is for love that you have been created. Look through the gate to the opportunities of life and you will see a multitude of forms of love that you can choose to give yourself to. You might remain single but if you give yourself to a journey of growing in love it will never be empty. Maybe one day you will marry or maybe you will never marry. If you do someday marry, I will happily throw rice. But if you never marry, you’re still meant to be someone who truly lives and surely loves.