Towards a deeper love: Lessons from The Jeweler’s Shop

By Ben Smith, Director of the Office of Life, Marriage and Family

The recent performances of St John Paul II’s The Jeweler’s Shop across Tasmania have laid some good foundations for the upcoming celebration of the World Meeting of Families on 25 June. A central theme to both of these events is the quality of love in the family and how it impacts children.

The play delves into this theme by exploring the life of three couples. The first couple, Teresa and Andrew, are at the threshold of marriage. After a challenging courtship, they had both come to “realize profoundly they ought to belong to each other, even though they had no convenient moods and sensations.” Unfortunately, their love story is cut short by Andrew’s untimely death leaving behind a young widow and a young child (Christopher). Their love was stronger than death and Teresa kept her love for Andrew burning to ensure Christopher grew up with an awareness of this deep love.

The experience of the second couple, Anna and Stefan, contrasts with that of Andrew and Teresa’s. From Anna’s perspective, love was “a matter of the senses … which unites and makes two people walk in the sphere of their feelings”. Their honeymoon period wore off after a few years and they subsequently become like solitary islands. A rift developed in their marriage that was acutely felt by Anna but not by Stefan. This rift passed into the soul of their children especially their daughter Monica.

The third couple, Christopher and Monica, are in love and thinking about marriage but they struggle to overcome various insecurities that they had absorbed from their family of origin. They eventually come to terms with their fears and enter into marriage with the help of their parent’s counsel.

The parable of the ten virgins is used in the play to explore the contrasting experience of the first two couples. Anna realizes that she is like one of the foolish virgins whose lamp had run out of oil. She encounters the Bridegroom but she is shocked and tormented when his face is that of Stefan’s. This encounter sets Anna on a new path of “giving and taking in different proportions than before.” Though this path was not without suffering “in the course of time a gradual calm came.” This play gives us the hope of improving the quality of our married love if we seek to “connect that love with the Love,” that comes from God.