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TOB Tuesdays

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I am beginning a new thing on my blog –> TOB Tuesdays. On Mondays, we have our TOB meetings at MA’s house were we basically watch a vid discuss it, talk about what happened during our weeks relating to TOB, act at being theologians and socialise.

I’m going to be writing what we would have talked about, what I found profound etc. on Tuesday! Hence TOB Tuesdays! And here is instalment one:

We watched Christopher West’s series ‘Into the heart’ and yesterdays video was the one on the Song of Songs and the marriage of Tobias and Sarah. One of the parts I found profound was the mentioning of eros and agape. He said God loves us not only with agape but also with eros, that Jesus is the agape of man and the eros of God. And a whole bunch of us were like but how?

We hashed it out and came to the following conclusion based a lot on what he said and how we have experienced love and TOB came through. It is an understanding that we experience everything through our senses. He says the Song of Songs witnesses to a love that is physical and divine, sensual and spiritual. Our physical senses can awake our spiritual senses, bringing us to a tasting of God, hearing God, feeling God, seeing God. That is experiencing the love that is God in all our ‘bodiliness’, that God reaches down into our vocabulary of sensual love in order to elevate in us the understanding of a great love that is God. For us to understand how we can burn with love for the divine, Jesus came to awake the sensual ( i.e. that which we feel with our body senses) love of our lives in order that we can fully experience the spiritual love in our lives.

This culminates in bringing in that extra essence of holiness in the conjugal embrace that we have talked about, that we begin to transform sex from something that is worshipped to it being worship of the glory of God, that marital love is a liturgy, an act of worship of God.

Another part we found ‘deep’ was that the essence of love is sacrificial and not always about what do I get. It’s about what we give, the giving of all, being ready to do everything in order that good may conquer. imageTobias and Sarah’s marriage showed that great pain may be involved within a marriage and highlights how we can’t live without God’s mercy. In Him we live and move and have our being. They prayed for their marriage and were in one accord with God, with no lust between their love.

So, Lord, we surrender all and pray Tobias’ prayer for our future spouses:

“Blessed are you, O God of our fathers; praised be your name forever and ever. Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever. You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support; and from these two the human race descended. You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’ Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.”

Amen and Amen!

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Comments

One response to “TOB Tuesdays”

  1. wow 🙂 so beautiful 🙂 truly beautiful 🙂

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