A year after I graduated college, I found myself sitting in adoration at a church across town on an average weekday evening. This was normal for me — jumping around my new city to different social and prayer gatherings for young adults. But while my community had grown, I still felt the ache for one person.
So it made sense that in that time of adoration, Christ would invite me to recognize my ache for himself — the One.
As I once again reiterated my desire for marriage, for an earthly spouse, to be a bride, Christ spoke to my heart. Staring ahead at his blessed body exposed in the monstrance, he gently whispered: “Every time you come to Communion, approach me, receive me as a bride.”
With prayer, I quickly recognized that this was not a sudden calling to religious life but to a deeper understanding of our universal vocation: holiness, eternal union with the Beloved.
For many years, I frequently pondered in prayer this theme of being a bride. It sustained me as I navigated seasons of singlehood, dating, and engagement.
Now, two years after marrying my husband, Dominic, I feel pulled to contemplate this call as a bride once more.
Why? Because I’ve lost focus. I’ve let my love grow complacent.
A new approach to heaven
Unsurprisingly, it was through revisiting “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis that I again recognized the call.
For those unfamiliar with Lewis’ great novella, “The Great Divorce” considers the divorce between heaven and hell — the great divide between eternal happiness with God and eternal suffering chosen of our own accord. My first reading of the story was a significant examination of conscience where I realized I didn’t want heaven more than the idols I had crafted out of people in my life, more than the comforts I desired. But this time, I recognized something else:
If heaven is the wedding feast of the Lamb, then our time here on earth is marriage prep.
Up until the moment of our death, we either choose or reject the Beloved, God, with every action, thought, beat of our hearts. And every moment, Christ tries to woo our hearts to him, speaking tenderly to us and revealing his goodness. Yet, so often we choose other things, other people, finite pleasures that will fade away and never satisfy. Until we pass away from this world, we have every opportunity to say yes, but we also can choose to say no.
This is the way of dating and engagement. There is a period of bliss where you are falling for the beloved. There are highs and lows, moments when you can’t wait to be married and moments when you question it for the hundredth time. Yet time draws you closer and closer to the moment when you completely surrender yourself out of love. And once that vow is made, it cannot be broken.
Once you reach heaven, you can never go back. But until you pass from this world, you can also choose to walk away from the altar of the Lamb.
Responding to the love of the Bridegroom
This reflection felt timely for the Advent season when we reflect, yes, on the Incarnation of Christ and his coming into our hearts, but also on Christ’s second coming at the end of time. It is this coming that attracts my contemplation each December, for the big question always remains: If Christ came today, would I be ready to be his bride? Do I joyfully await the day I can be united to the eternal Beloved?
Too often we think of heaven in negative terms: fear of the eternal unknown, fear of a taskmaster awaiting the time of our judgment. But that is the wrong way to approach God.
Yes, it is right to approach our judgment with fear and trembling, but not because God is waiting to spite us. Rather, proper fear of the Lord is the fear of disappointing a loved one — in this case, the One who loves us more than we can imagine. We should long to be worthy of the Bridegroom’s love, which will never cease whether we reciprocate it or not. And we should strive to hear and accept his invitation — his eternal proposal — every day of our lives until we reach the altar of the wedding of the Lamb.
Another misconception about heaven is that we will eventually tire of it, that it will prove boring. Yet, again, we approach heaven with a temporal understanding. We tire of all good things here on earth because they are only glimpses of the heavenly goodness that awaits; they are still imperfect and, therefore, fail to satisfy. But we will never tire of God. In heaven, we will eternally discover new things about God. We will forever be falling more deeply in love as the Beloved continues to amaze us.
“When you painted on earth at least in your earlier days it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.
“But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already.”
— C.S. Lewis, “The Great Divorce”
Advent is a season of awaiting the arrival of the Bridegroom into time and space, into our hearts.
Advent is the time of the bride.
Are you ready for the Bridegroom?
“The whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake.”
— C.S. Lewis, “The Great Divorce”