There’s a song in the movie The Greatest Showman that makes me melt every time I listen to it. And as my YouTube search history will attest, I listen to it pretty often.

If you have seen the movie, you might remember the scene where Zendaya and Zac Efron fly through the air on trapeze ropes while declaring their love through song - that’s the one I’m talking about. (If you haven’t seen the movie, the song is called “Rewrite the Stars” and I highly recommend it.) Two lines in particular stand out to me:

“You know I want you
It’s not a secret I’ve tried to hide…”

Because I’ve been discerning religious life for the past few months, because I’m a bit of a nerd, and because the Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways, I suddenly thought, “What a beautiful metaphor for God’s pursuit of my soul.”  Listening to those lyrics, I was reminded of God revealing Himself throughout Scripture as Lover, Bridegroom, and Husband.

Do I really believe that God Almighty - the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world - could want me? Do I believe that God might be asking me to enter religious life not because I drew the short vocational straw, but because that is how I will best come to know, love, and receive Him?

And what if I understood this possible call to consecrated life as the romantic marriage proposal it is? And if I’m not called to religious life, how can I hold onto this realization that God loves me so deeply and personally? These questions have inspired much reflection over the past few months.

[H]ow can I hold onto this realization that God loves me so deeply and personally?

Imagining God as Lover of my soul may be new to me, but there is nothing new about it. The love poetry in the Song of Songs is quite clear, as is the spousal imagery found in other parts of the Bible, such as the Book of Hosea. The saints have also weighed in on this topic. St. John of the Cross wrote beautiful poetry that paints God and the soul as Lover and Beloved, respectively.

The different marital analogies often evoked in the Church intrigue me, and there are quite a few. We speak of marriage as an analogy for Christ’s relationship with the Church, a consecrated woman’s relationship with Christ, and a priest’s relationship with the Church. Marriage is even seen as an image of the relationship between the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

If marriage is an analogy for our relationship with God, what can I (a very single woman) take away from this? What do I know about marriage? As a single person, not as much as some. However, I do know about four aspects of marriage that are analogous to our individual relationships with God.

First, marriage is a relationship of equals. Before the heresy alert sounds, let me clarify: I am fully aware that we are God’s creatures, dependent on Him and in no way His equals. Throughout salvation history, however, we’re confronted with a curious plot twist: God humbles Himself and “lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52). God does not need us, and yet He offers us the dignity of cooperating in His plan of salvation. God does not need our love, and yet He permits us to wound Him through rejection or to please Him through loving Him. God shows a strange and beautiful vulnerability in asking for our love, knowing that we will also hurt Him.

God shows a strange and beautiful vulnerability in asking for our love, knowing that we will also hurt Him.

The spousal imagery in the Book of Hosea shows us this vulnerability. In the second chapter, God tells unfaithful Israel, “You shall call me ‘My husband,’ and you shall never again call me ‘My baal’” (Hosea 2:18). We can easily interpret “baal” as a reference to the idolatry that the Israelites picked up from neighboring lands, but it’s telling that “baal” also means “lord or master.” As Jesus told His disciples, He doesn’t desire a master/slave relationship with us, rather He invites us into a divine friendship (John 15:15).

This leads to my second point: marriage is freely chosen by both the husband and the wife. God pursues us and He also respects our free will, given to us by Him. We can choose to ignore Him, refuse Him, and even outright defy Him - and He will never force us to love Him. In fact, He cannot force us to love Him, because that wouldn’t be love. He pursues us because He loves us and because He knows that we can only be truly happy in Him. If anyone had cause to force someone to do something, it would be God because He alone knows what will make us happy. If anyone had the right to force us to do something, it would be God, our perfect, just, and omnipotent Creator. And yet, God is the only one who will always and completely respect our freedom.

God pursues us and He also respects our free will. . . We can choose to ignore Him, refuse Him, and even outright defy Him - and He will never force us to love Him.

Third, each spouse desires the welfare and ultimate happiness of the other. Closely related to this is my fourth point: a husband and wife have real affection for one another. Not only do they want the very best for each other, but they also genuinely enjoy each other’s company.

At the end of the often misunderstood passage about marriage in Ephesians 5, St. Paul says, “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32). I love this verse because it seems to suggest that 1) what Paul has previously said is not as simple as it might sound, and 2) when Paul spoke about marriage just before that statement, he was speaking (perhaps primarily) about the relationship between Christ and the Church. Without trying to to put words into Paul’s mouth, it seems to me that he’s not only telling us to model our marriage and spousal roles after the relationship between Christ and the Church. Rather, I think Paul is also encouraging us to look at the deep, committed, and freely given love between a husband and wife as the closest image we have for the immense love Christ has for His Church, a love which we can’t fully understand.

God’s love for the Church, for each one us, is not an analogy for marriage; marriage is an (imperfect) analogy for God’s love. God’s love is the real deal and marriage is a reflection of it, and even the best reflections can’t be substitutes for the real thing. I don’t say this to demean marriage, but only to say that I wonder if we sometimes misinterpret Paul’s words. What if speaking of Christ as Bridegroom is less prescriptive of how our lives and marriages ought to look, and more descriptive of God’s love for us? And if we believed God to be deeply, vulnerably, freely in love with us, how might that open our hearts a little bit more to the reality of His perfect love?

“I belong to my lover, and my lover belongs to me” (Song of Songs 6:3).