August 7, 2010 • By K. Swann

So, go the lyrics to the song "See How Man Was Made” off of Josh Ritter’s most recent release, So Runs the World Away. The song is simple, powerful and, like most of Josh Ritter’s music, evocative. He is no stranger to Biblical allusions and though he often bends them toward aloof sacrilege he is equally prone to dressing them in a sort of severe monastic pensiveness. Such is the case with the slow and holy swell of old wisdom that makes this short song so lovely.

 

It is indeed a beautiful song. But the reason it has commanded the attention of my pen is not, most immediately, because of its composition or its suspiciously Christian view on the creational-relational dynamics of man and woman. No. What truly startled me to attention about this tune was that the second I heard the pluck of the guitar strings followed by the slow, swelling horns in the background, I knew that it was to be the processional song at my wedding. I knew that it would announce to the world that I had finally found my home.

There is never anything convenient about moments like these. They come upon you, in some ways, with the same unstoppable and sober weight of the death of a loved one or (more positively one would hope) the arrival of a child. Even if the event has been highly anticipated for some time, there is one moment in the thousands buzzing by that leaves you conscious of having gotten to the other side of something. Suddenly, you find that the world has shifted its landscape and the changes cannot be ignored. Before you stand valleys, mountains and oceans in the face of which we have to decide what kind of people we are going to be—what kind of road we are going to walk.

 

In the face of marriage, I can remember wanting to run. To simply run away and finally prove to the world that I was the coward it suspected me to be. One can hardly blame me. We are surrounded by divorce in this country and I had people inside and outside the church warning me that I was on the verge of choking my dreams at the roots. I listened as people soberly explained that I would wind up resenting the woman I married because my commitments to her would rob me of the time I needed to build the life I wanted for myself.

 

These external sparks set the dry and lifeless fears already in my belly aflame. I was all too aware of my brokenness and my selfishness as it was. I would wake up in cold sweats at times thinking about all of the ways that I could fail. My own cowardice proved far too complicated for me to face or even make sense of—so I just started believing what others were telling me. I even managed to twist my fear into the likeness of a noble selflessness. Thinking to myself, ‘even if it hurts both of us in the short run, I have to be man enough to put an end to this for the sake of the pain it may save her from in the long run.’

 

As I reflect on the feelings I felt trying to wrestle with the weight of marriage, I am astonished at the craftiness of my own broken mind. It twisted the dignified moment of being discovered by love into an oppression that had to be overcome by any means necessary. It is in this reflection that I realized my whole experience was an allusion to the same primordial story as Josh Ritter’s lyrics: Creation and fall in the Garden of Eden.

 

I can see Adam and Eve standing together in the shade of a beautiful tree—harmoniously reflecting the image of their God. I can hear the hiss and slither of the snake at its roots as he twists God’s commands and suggests the possibilities of an unknown future. I can hear the snap of the fruit in Eve’s mouth, and though my imagination is insufficient to conjure this image, I can see the horror as Adam and Eve become aware of one another’s nakedness and, for the first time, fearfully hide from one another. Then there follows the terrible moment when God comes looking for his beloved humankind, only to find them broken and bereft of his image.

 

"Please! See how man was made,” comes Ritter’s artistic plea. "Man wasn’t made to be alone,” he says. I see now why the song startled me so and why it continues to mean so much to me as I strive toward marriage. The story it echoes is my story—a story that reminds me to shake free from the slithers and hisses of those that deify the safe stronghold of autonomy and to face the dangerous world of vulnerability and nakedness. They are words that constantly challenge us to put the risk of love into its proper perspective: the return to Eden.

 

 

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