Marriage
by:
Frederica Mathewes-Green
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The bridal season is in full swing, and many of us have already clutched
more little plastic champagne stems than we can count. As I look back
over my own 29 years of marriage-most of them years as a pastor's wife,
with the unique perspective that gives on other people's marriages-there
are two mistakes I think a new couple can make. The first is to take
marriage too seriously. The second is to fail to take it seriously
enough.
Now, I'm talking about marriage, not the wedding. An overblown wedding
will not guarantee a happy marriage, especially if it overblows the
budget. Some pastors have noticed that the success of a marriage is
inversely proportional to the scale of the wedding. So don't make a
fairytale wedding both beginning and end of the story; real fairytales
last more than one day, and go on happily every after.
Here's where we first need to correct assumptions, though. What does a
happy marriage look like? Modern life places more burdens on the
institution than it can bear, and it trembles under the weight. In
earlier societies, a husband and wife would have a broad circle to draw
on: wise older relatives, adult brothers and sisters, church and
community relationships that stretched from one end of life to the
other. Recurrent events like barn-raising and childbearing would keep
throwing same-gender friends together, strengthening their bonds.
Married couples didn't have to get all their support within the four
walls of the home, or the bedroom. But in a mobile age the isolated
couple clings to each other more tightly; marriage gets unrealistically
idealized, and the smallest flaw leads to panic. Someone could write a
book called "The Good-Enough Marriage."
Tolstoy famously wrote that "happy families are all alike," and maybe
they're alike chiefly in not expecting to be happy all the time. They
meet problems and disappointments and take them in stride. In a real
marriage, the dishes get dirty, the wife gets plump, the husband gets
bald, and everyone gets grumpy at least occasionally. In the course of a
lifetime together, everyone will need forgiveness, and happy families
learn that giving it is the best way to insure receiving it in return.
Which brings us to the other risk, that of undervaluing marriage. No one
should anticipate that the daily experience of marriage will be
uniformly dazzling. But there is more to marriage than we can see,
something that is truly dazzling. Of all the varieties of human
relationship, it is marriage alone about which St. Paul wrote, "This
mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and
the church."
In the fourth century, the gifted preacher St. John Chrysostom wrestled
with the meaning of those words. He notes that Jesus' saying, "the two
shall become one flesh," takes us back to the original moment of
creation. "God's ingenuity in the beginning divided one flesh into
two…[the woman] was made from [the man's] side, so they are two halves
of one organism." St. John goes on, "A father rejoices to see his son or
daughter marry; it is as if his child's body is finally becoming
complete."
St. John doesn't hesitate to acknowledge the fleshly nature of a
one-flesh union, to the evident embarrassment of his congregation (when
they register shock, he reminds them that it was God's idea in the first
place). While the conception of a child is a beautiful evidence of
union, even if there is no child, "their intercourse effects the joining
of their bodies and they are made one, just as when perfume is mixed
with ointment."
"We are not sufficient to ourselves in this life," St. John concludes.
The wedding glow fades, and daily marriage has its disappointments. Why
put up with it? Because it is far harder to be alone. The world is too
big and we are too small to make it through without being trampled.
Marriage is a buddy system; God created us in his image, then split us
in two, so that we would ever yearn for reunion. The continuation of the
human race is one pretty good outcome of this plan, but even more
glorious is the way marriage can transform each partner so that their
unity reflects the image of God. The daily experience of that union will
not always be transporting; it may be tedious or annoying or even
wracked by tragedy. Yet we stick together, giving a boost or a reality
check as needed, helping each other grow into what God created us to be,
leaning on each other all the long way home.
"It is not good for man to be alone," but it is also positively good to
be together. The light you loved in your lover's eyes at the beginning
grows more compellingly beautiful through the years. You meet those eyes
in worship, in passion, in anger, in tears, over the baby's bassinet,
over your father's casket. There is no substitute for the years, the
life-time work, of looking into those eyes. Gradually, you see yourself
there; gradually, you become one. And when husband and wife are one, St.
John writes, "they have not become the image of anything on earth, but
of God himself."
This essay was first published by beliefnet.com in June 2003
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