Part of what seems so pleasing to me is how hard we work to make sure that BEMA is a place of romance and spontaneity. Just kidding, but in all seriousness, it was neat to be able to be a part of that.
It made me think of conversations we've had in BEMA about relationships, love, marriage, and sex. We did a lot of talking about these things when we studied Song of Songs in our study of the ketuvim (the "Writings") last year. Our discussion settled around three Hebrew words for love: raya, ahava, and dod.
The first biblical idea of love is raya. Raya is the friendship expression of love. Sometimes we would talk about this love as being 'brotherly love'. It's the same kind of idea that is connected to our neighbor. We have raya for those around us. In a romantic sense, raya is the infatuation that one has for the other person; that sense of not being able to get them off your mind. It's full of the emotion and the romance of a newly budding relationship.
The second idea of love in the Hebrew bible is that of ahava. Ahava is the commitment of a loving relationship. In an ironic twist, the Bible asks us not to just raya our neighbor -- don't just raya your reyacha -- but to ahava them. The biblical call to love our neighbor is to be committed to them. We are to love our neighbors unconditionally through the ups and downs of life. Obviously, the ahava moment is when the couple commits to being together forever, no matter what life throws their way. The proposal is the desire to enter into ahava. Marriage is about ahava.
Then we have the third idea of love -- dod. Dod is the erotic, sexual expression of love. It's the love being referenced and described in the Song of Songs. Pretty straight forward; not much need for explanation here.
In a romantic relationship, the three loves are meant to be experienced together. Rob Bell once described these ideas of love as three flames; the flames are meant to be experienced as a raging fire. Many, many of the problems we experience in our culture come as a result of not pursuing the full expression of love as God intended. We have relationships (especially in the college culture) that are full of raya and dod without the ahava. This is a problem. Equally problematic is a marriage based solely on ahava without any raya or dod. It's not meant to be that way.
In the biblical culture, people may or may not have had raya early in the relationship. Marriages were often arranged more than chosen. They often did not know their spouse well at all. They came to ahava, consummated the marriage with dod, and took the next year of their life (off of work, no service in the military, very little community responsibility) and they got to know their spouse. They discovered raya.
While this system may be less than appealing to many and have its own challenges, the tragedy of much of our culture is that we seem to get our formula backwards and never own up to our own challenges. We romanticize the dating/courting experience. We cover ourselves in raya. We struggle to find the dod experience in its appropriate context*. When the wedding finally arrives, we highten up the romance and the songs -- the raya -- and we celebrate dod, but we have somehow missed ahava. We then wonder why marriages are so doomed in our culture. We must do a better job equipping our young adults to find ahava in the midst of our relationships**.
I want to congratulate Bill and Abby on their recent engagement. I celebrate with them their relationship, their love, their romance and their future. But I also want to hope that in the months to come, they prepare themselves to accept the wild adventure that is AHAVA.
May they stand before each other, in the presence of family, friends and God Himself, and make a promise that no matter what life throws their way, they choose each other.
* By the way, parents, when you encourage children to enjoy raya, but postpone dod until ahava -- and then tell your children not to grab ahava until later in life, you are setting them up for failure; God has designed the three flames to burn together. I suppose the ideal situation would be to begin pursuing raya when you are ready to find that special someone, when you've found that someone and decided to pursue ahava together, then do it and pursue relationships as God intended. If you aren't willing to pursue the three flames, don't mess with any of them; to do so would be disastrous
** I realize that there are a thousand different scenarios that I'm simply not going to attempt to deal with (i.e. the struggle of being single and finding a mate, the long and justified pre-marital relationship trying to stay away from dod, and every other exception that one could think of). My goal is to communicate a general principle: in my opinion, to try and pursue a relationship that is void of certain aspects of Godly design is potentially (I did not say impossible) disastrous. If, for whatever reason, one cannot pull the trigger on a full, martial relationship, they need to be ready to experience problems that could lead to the dissolution of said relationship. We should be people that help cultivate this understanding. Instead, I have repeatedly found that we do the exact opposite.
I read it. We are probably going to have to Skype again. :)
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