Sunday school today was based on chapter 7 of Peter Leithart’s book on marriage. I’ve been rereading Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer and the lesson forcefully reminded me of the protagonist’s observation of being ruled by (in this case a counterfeit) love:

No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death–every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes withins us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.