My wife, Donna, and I were talking the other day about some plans we have for the future.

“That idea benefits me a lot more than it benefits you,” I said about the possible use of an upstairs spare room. Later in the conversation we were discussing the renovation of the basement. “If the plan upstairs benefits you, I’m definitely going to get a lot more out of what we’re doing in the basement,” Donna said. She had not finished the sentence before I was pretty sure I knew what we were both thinking.

“It really is true, isn’t it?” I said. “What benefits one benefits both.”

I’ll keep the remainder of the conversation off the record, but I will share one conclusion: After 34 years of marriage—involving two kids, several houses, a couple of really bad cars, a couple of surgeries, countless bills, camping trips, bad decisions, church services, batches of cookies, and a few arguments—we truly have become, not two, but one. It’s not a theory. It’s the truth.

Not long after the above conversation, I read Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and I came across these sentences: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32, NIV).

I’ve been reading Ephesians a lot recently, and for a particular reason. I have been trying to understand what Paul means by the two-word phrase: “in Christ.” According to New Testament scholar Adolf Deissmann, Paul uses those words, or variations on the theme, 164 times. I haven’t counted how many times the phrase occurs in Ephesians, nor have I fully satisfied my curiosity about its meaning, but it seems clear that the unity of two married people is one key to the mystery of being “in Christ.” Somehow, the union of two people in a good marriage reveals something about the Christian’s union with Christ.

So I had been working my mind over these thoughts for several days when I came across a July 20 piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks. He quoted from a recent book titled I Am a Strange Loop by Indiana University Professor of Cognitive Science Douglas Hofstadter. The professor and his wife, Carol, were happily married—with children, ages 5 and 2—when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Not long after, at age 42, Carol died. In his book, Hofstadter describes his thoughts as he looked at a picture of Carol a few months after her funeral:

“I looked at her face and looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, ‘That’s me. That’s me!’ And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain.”

There it is, described as powerfully as I have ever heard it: the experience of two becoming one—the fusion of souls into one entity.

It was something like this fusion, only perhaps even more profound, that Christ envisioned with His people. On the eve of His crucifixion, He prayed these words:

“My prayer is not for them (His first disciples) alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20-21).

I claim no more than a faltering, inconsistent grasp of this experience, but the mere possibility of such a relationship with God is both humbling and awe-inspiring. I suspect that, just as there are many versions of a deeply satisfying marriage, so the relationship with God takes on different characteristics with each individual. But it seems clear that, whatever the details, there is no limit to the depth of the bond God desires to have with us.

And here is another key to the meaning of the phrase "in Christ": Jesus did not speak of the experience of "oneness" as if it is to be a solitary accomplishment. He prayed “that all of them may be one.” Nor did Paul say, “I am talking about Christ and the individual.” What He said was, “I am talking about Christ and the church.”

Now that is not something everyone wants to hear—that the church has something to do with this deeply meaningful relationship with God, but it is an unavoidable conclusion from Paul’s words in Ephesians. We’ll explore that angle more fully in a future entry in the Editor’s Journal.

B.W.