Love + Duty = Grace?

I promise I'm not trying to follow a theme. But last night after work, i was channel surfing, hoping desperately to find a good movie and stumbled across a beautiful film called The Painted Veil. Naomi Watts is an adulteress wife named Kitty and as punishment, her husband, Walter, played by Edward Norton, drags her with him into the middle of a cholera epidemic in Asia during the roaring twenties. In the midst of death, their contempt for one another grows into passionate love until (spoiler alert) he dies of cholera at the end.

I was so mad I wanted to throw my cell phone at the tv.

But then I started thinking, the movie had to end that way. Kitty befriends a nun who takes notice of the blossoming relationship between the husband and wife. Kitty denies this love and says its her mere duty to accompany her husband to Asia, and the nun compares the two of them to her relationship with God.

"Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding. "

The nun fell passionately in love with God at the age of seventeen only to share the same indifference toward Him as an old married woman sitting silently with her husband across the room with nothing to say. I think that would've happened to the two characters had Walter lived. Kitty loved parties, dancing, and tennis. He enjoyed science, museums and bridge. The cholera epidemic gave them a common purpose, but eventually they'd leave Asia only to return to there differences. The love would fade and only duty would remain.


I hope that never happens to me.

To spend a lifetime with someone for duty alone would be a great disappointment. To spend eternity without grace would be devasting. And relationships must have more than the elements of love and duty; there's no formula or equation to having grace within us. It's a gift to be cherished for all our lives. If we truly treasure grace, I don't see how love could ever become like washing our hands.

...right?