Don Quixote & Heartsight
Having laid down the melancholy burden of sanity, Don Quixote became a knight. Before he’s carried back home in a cage he shows himself courteous, gentle, brave and longsuffering. Unless there’s some evil enchantment, all the women he meets are beautiful and worthy of the greatest respect and the men (most of them) are assumed to be good and noble. In return for all this he’s beaten, mocked and humiliated. Literary giant, J. B Priestly, speaking of Don Quixote, noted how strange it is that “it is the butt of the company, the man out of his wits, who sees what everybody ought to be seeing, if our values were really what we claim them to be, if Christendom existed outside our sermons and dreams.”
Our heart determines how we see and what we see.
In an Expository Times article some years back the editor C. S Rodd rehearses an incident told by Russell Maltby that is both painful and glorious. Maltby was acquainted with a man whose wife left him for another shortly after their marriage. She went back and the husband welcomed her home, but it happened again and again; her going to the other man and the husband giving her his heart and a home on her return.
A friend of the abused husband spoke to him, wanting to commiserate with and comfort him, but the husband stopped him with a terse, “Not a word! She’s my wife.” She returned home after a final absence and some time later died in her patient and loving husband’s arms.
Rodd shared this story with his assembly one morning and a marriage counsellor on his way out of the building remarked to Rodd that the husband’s “psychological problems needed to be looked at.”
Maybe, maybe not. If the husband had been firmer, would his wife have responded differently? Should he have given her an ultimatum? Who can say? But it’s interesting to me that this marriage counsellor, who knew nothing more about the situation than you and I do, was perfectly willing to see the husband as a disturbed man. The man who was gladly paying an awful price in this painful situation is seen as needing therapy?
(This piece is quoted by permission from my little book Celebrating the Wrath of God, published by Waterbrook Press, a division of Random House.)
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.