Friday, May 9, 2008

Part 2: Worshipping Your Wife – If Not Literally, How?


So, picking up from the previous post, why do I use the term “Wife Worship” if it’s not to be taken literally, or seriously?

To quote R.M. Nixon, “Let me say this about that.”

Many of us husbands in FLRs do experience strong emotions of reverence and devotion toward our wives. These emotions can be downright intoxicating.

We may even attribute mystical or religious significance to these experiences, seeing our wives transfigured before our eyes as goddesses, or incarnations of feminine perfection.

We intend no sacrilege; I think we just get carried away.

Female supremacists, like Elise Sutton, sometimes refer to these visionary and worshipful states as “sub-space.” “Sub” meaning “submissive,” which conjures the attitudes and postures of worship, in this case of one’s beloved.

However labeled, this amorous intoxication, like any mystical state, is not easily sustained. Nor is it easily forgotten. The afterglow endures and continues to entice.

So a husband inquires on an FLR message board, “Does anyone else out there have a wife-worship mantra running through his head?” Clearly, this is guy is trying to induce his favorite trance-state.

“I’ve never been able to relate to an abstract concept of God,” writes another husband. “Now all my spiritual yearnings have found a focus in my wonderful wife. At times when we are together, I feel the presence of divinity.”

What ought a husband to do with these worshipful yearnings? What ultimate purpose do they serve, other than as expressions of devotion?

One might ask the same sort of question of anyone who pursues higher consciousness or any mystical state as an end in itself. What’s the point of “illumination” if it doesn’t leads to some kind of benign transformation of the one supposedly illuminated?

Let me quote Elise Sutton further on this point: “Meditating before an altar may allow you to show your love, devotion and respect to a deity you cannot see nor touch. But women are amongst you, so in order to love, adore, respect and revere women it takes interacting with them. Women have needs that must be attended to, and I believe man was put here on this earth to meet those needs.”

Most devoted husbands have figured this out: “We men aren't learning to serve some abstract entity called 'Woman,'” one man counsels his fellows. “We are learning how to serve specific women, each of whom has highly individualized expectations and desires.”

By connecting all the dots in this way, Wife Worship can become a unifying principle and give shape and purpose to a man’s life.

Commenting on previous posting on this topic, “enoch” wrote: “I certainly don't view my wife as a goddess, but I have, in my mind, considered her in a way as a ‘savior’… The way I see it, she has literally saved me from wasting my life… I view her as my leader, but not as my God.”

“Men were given a wonderful power, a great gift from Mother Nature,” writes another man in a similar vein. “We are capable of tremendous service and sacrifice, when we are truly committed to a goal. We are most content when we have a great adventure before us. We have that cause at the feet of our Goddesses. To lift Them to their rightful roles as the Divine Inspiration to our otherwise sad and empty lives. To give our bodies, our minds, and our lives, to serve and defend these Brave, Beautiful, Nurturing, Challenging, Life-giving, Playful, Wondrous Women. With Their guidance, our lives once again become real and connected to the natural world.”

Female supremacist Paige Harrison proudly affirms all these wifely roles in her own marriage: “I am [my husband's] Mentor, Teacher, Priestess, Goddess Queen and the Matriarch of the Family.”

To be more explicit, wife worship can be a portal through which a husband is led into a deeper and wider worship, with the wife as his spiritual leader. One wife puts it thus:

“For families that are matriarchal, religion can be made more important and the man can submit to God and his wife so that he can experience the grace he was missing.”

“My household is a definite matriarchy and it's Christian,” a husband boasts. This man adds that his marital problems were resolved and his faith restored after a female evangelic minister (“Pastor Florence”) gave him and his wife a special prayer for daily use. The prayer goes, in part:

“Dear Jesus, let me recognize your image in my wife, and give my wife grace and courage to take the reins of leadership as mother and wife. Help her to lead our marriage with compassion and wisdom. Open my heart to loving submission to You and to her and by this may we avoid a broken marriage and through You may she strengthen my resolve for You."

“My gift of loving submission to her has made my wife blossom into the leader God intended her to be,” this husband concludes, “and things are great at church, in our social life, at home, and in the bedroom.”

It is even so in my own marriage, I hasten to confess. Like enoch quoted above, my wife has rescued me from wasting my life. I have prospered under her guidance and leadership from the moment I became attached to her romantically.

I have only a few more thoughts on wife-worship and religion, but I think I’ll save them for another post.

4 comments:

enoch said...

I've seen other men describe being in "sub-space" but have never experienced this myself. However, last night, I had an experience that I thought came close.

My wife was asleep on the couch. We'd had a busy Mother's Day, which included going to a baseball game and having Chinese for dinner. I was still up, as I'd been doing some of the bills on the computer, and I went over to wake her up for bed. She was asleep in a sitting position, and I knelt before her (which I often do), and wrapped my arms around her. And before I tried to wake her up, I just looked at her.

I looked at this wonderful woman - and I thought about just how lucky I am. And I could feel the love I have for her welling up inside me as I gazed at her face. And the longer I was like this, the more entranced I felt. She was so beautiful... and I was so fortunate.

And as I knelt before her, I thought breifly about your blog-post, about the description of "sub-space" and about the whole idea of wife-worship which you've been talking about in these last two posts.

But mostly I thought about her.

Mark Remond said...

enoch, your post reminded me of a like-minded experience once cited on Lady Misato's website... a husband watching his wife as she slept and being overcome by a welter of emotions, culminating in a desire to pay home to her feet.
As I recall, this guy had been a real crummy husband until this "conversion" experience, like Saul of Tarsus before being unhorsed on the Road to Damascus.

Mark Remond said...

ps - sorry, I meant "pay homage" to her feet.

enoch said...

"Husband watching his wife as she slept". I just remembered an old episode of Dallas, where JR Ewing had that same reaction - he was gazing down at SueEllen, passed-out drunk after discovering he was cheating on her yet again, and he said out-loud "What have I done to you, SueEllen?"

Of course, being JR, this little bit of insight had no lasting effects.