The Sacred Romance

The Lovers That Ask Less of Us

Brent Curtis on why we trade the Sacred Romance for something safer.

Nephesh.ai

In the summer of 1997, a counselor named Brent Curtis published an essay in Mars Hill Review called “Less-Wild Lovers.” It ran twenty-odd pages. It later became a chapter in The Sacred Romance, the book he wrote with John Eldredge. Within a year Curtis was dead, killed in a climbing accident, and the essay took on the weight that last words acquire.

It is, on its surface, a piece about spiritual disappointment. It is really a piece about what we do with desire when desire has hurt us.

The longing

Curtis begins where he thinks every human being already is: with a longing that will not leave. He calls it the Sacred Romance. Philosophers, he notes, have a colder word for it — the desire for transcendence, the sense of being made for something out of the ordinary that is good.

His point is not that this longing is rare or religious. His point is that it is everywhere and mostly unnamed. It arrives through art and music and story, through a smell that returns you to childhood, through the particular quality of light on an autumn afternoon. It arrives most often as loss — the sense that something or someone has left, with a promise to return. And it does not submit to analysis. Studying it, he says, gets you no closer than studying a corpse gets you to the person who lived in it.

If this longing were the only deep thing we knew, Curtis argues, we would never lose heart. We would spend our lives searching, and the search itself would keep us alive.

The Arrows

But a second message arrives, and it arrives early.

Curtis calls it the Message of the Arrows. He borrows from Simone Weil the observation that only two things pierce the human heart: beauty, and affliction. And every one of us, he says, has known enough pain to raise serious doubts about the universe we live in.

The Arrows are not always dramatic. Some are. But most are the accumulated evidence that wanting things is dangerous — that hope embarrasses you, that need is a liability, that the people who were supposed to come did not come.

Scripture does not pretend these arrows are imaginary. It promises accompaniment rather than exemption:

Resignation

Here is the hinge of the essay, and the part most often skipped.

Between the wounding and the compromise there is a middle state, and Curtis names it resignation. Resignation is not grief. Grief still believes something was worth losing. Resignation is the settled acceptance of the loss as final — the decision to stop expecting.

Good becomes merely “nice” and evil becomes “normal.” Brent Curtis

That is what resignation does to moral perception, and it is the sentence in the essay I have never been able to shake. The categories flatten. Nothing is worth the risk of being wrong about, because nothing is worth much.

A resigned person is not in despair. That is what makes the condition so hard to spot. A resigned person is functioning, competent, often admired.

The compromise: less-wild lovers

From resignation comes the trade. The heart will not stop wanting altogether — Curtis is clear that it cannot — so it settles for lovers that are less dangerous, less demanding of vulnerability, less wild.

He sorts them into two families.

Anesthesia. This is control by deadening. We manage desire by filling the space where it lives with order and competence and motion. The immaculate house. The full calendar. The clean desk. The spotless yard. And — Curtis is unsparing here — a religion of technique: memorization as mastery, three-step solutions to every problem, service that keeps us usefully in motion and safely at a distance. None of these things is bad. That is precisely what makes them effective. Nobody has to explain a full schedule.

Indulgence. This is control by immediate gratification. The affair, the substance, the pornography, the obsession with sport, the life lived off one’s own giftedness. Curtis’s insight about why these bind is the sharpest thing in the essay. The problem is not that indulgence touches nothing real. The problem is that it touches something entirely real — the exact place in us made for transcendent communion — while coming from a source that is not transcendent. It reaches the right room through the wrong door, and then it will not let go.

The two families look like opposites. Curtis says they are the same strategy. Both are attempts to get a taste of transcendence while keeping the heart under management.

Why this lands hardest inside the church

Curtis is a Christian writing to Christians, and he does not soften the application.

The most durable less-wild lover available to a believer, he argues, is Christian religion itself. He borrows Bunyan’s Vanity Fair to describe it: booths lining the road, each selling something genuinely good — Bible study, community service, seminars, retreats, ministry roles — and all of it capable of functioning as anesthesia. We can conduct a spiritual life for decades on the strength of activity, and never once let the thing we actually want come up for air.

The essay’s most affecting passage is a counseling story. A woman had built her identity on competence — on being the one who helps. When she felt genuine gratitude from clients, she deflected it. Curtis reads her anger at her own surprise as the tell: she did not yet trust that there was anything in her worth loving apart from her usefulness. Her competence had become the safest place to hide.

What God is said to feel about this

Curtis’s second major move is to insist that God’s response to our compromise is not primarily juridical.

Read the prophets, he says, and the register is not a violated statute. It is a jilted lover.

And the charge, when it comes, is a charge about thirst rather than about rule-breaking:

Two evils, and only the second is what we usually call sin. The first is leaving the water.

The road he ends on

The essay closes at a crossroads. One road is broad, sensible, and well-marked with signs promising success. The other is the way of the heart, and it looks — Curtis is honest about this — like a lesser road. It offers no assurances.

The condition of walking it is the hardest thing he asks. To hope for the goodness that would set the heart free, we have to be willing to let our desire go on being unsatisfied. Real goodness, on this side of things, comes by surprise and on a timing not ours. It cannot be scheduled, secured, or held. The moment we try to guarantee it, we are back at the booths.

He does not end in triumph. He ends with two people striking off down a road they have long avoided, more alive than they have been in a while, and with no idea how they will cross what lies ahead.