Marriage is perhaps the most striking paradox in the material cosmos. How can doing marriage right be at once so necessary and so difficult? Yet in this, it is the perfect mirror of human life itself.
While life is not simply about marriage, or in any case not with another human person, the marriage of man and woman stands as perhaps the central archetype of truly human living, in its magnificent and arduous glory. Here we see our deep kinship with the lower animal world while also how the human difference makes such a dramatic difference. Here we are daily challenged to become ourselves while also to become instruments of others becoming themselves. The reality of marriage, indeed we should say the plan for marriage, is at once so natural and so shocking, it takes the breath away.
Xenophon, the great contemporary of Plato and student of Socrates, pens in immortal words what can be discovered by all of us: “For it seems to me that the gods exercised especially acute discernment in establishing the particular pairing which is called male and female, to ensure that such a pair may form a perfect partnership in mutual service.”
Xenophon does not say that in marriage man and woman always form a perfect partnership. He says that by divine arrangement, marriage may become a perfect partnership. Acute divine discernment established the natural plan. No wonder then that acute human discernment is required to discover it. And then live it.
Often it is only in the doing of marriage that the plan can really come into focus. This can seem a flaw; wouldn’t it be better, as with building a house, to know the plan thoroughly beforehand? Point well taken.
But as is often the case in what is from nature, we come to expect the unexpected. Or rather, we find that what we thought should have been the case is not. There is actually a better way. A way that really works, if it’s really followed.
Clearly, being willing to learn as we go, and to start anew, again and again: this IS part of the plan. And it really works. Beyond our wildest imaginings. Even partial success is success. We simply must keep going; discerning; following; leading. Praying.
It’s all a gift. A gift we can learn to receive; and then also give. ~ ~ ~
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Husband, father, and professor of Philosophy. LifeCraft springs from one conviction: there is an ancient wisdom about how to live the good life in our homes, with our families; and it is worth our time to hearken to it. Let’s rediscover it together. Learn more.
My wife Cindy and I just celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary on Monday. When we exchanged vows on the 15th of January 2000, it was 5* outside here in eastern Ct. It was a brutally cold day to have a 10am mass. One fellow coming through the receiving line following mass, quipped that if we could survive getting married on such a cold day, our marriage could survive anything.
This is, well, spectacular. Like my marriage, coincidentally. We’re married 35+ years: the kids, the grandkids, the fusion, the otherworldliness amid the mundane, the glory of my wife within whom lived 3 people, our children, the universe-shattering of making them together with God, the highway to Heaven.
But do we know enough to be able to describe or say what it is that makes a marriage a good one? What is it that exists in such a good marriage that is found nowhere else? What if we were to look at what everyone knows is pure and total love: that which a parent has for his or her child. There is nothing perhaps that such a parent would not do for that child, including sacrificing his life to save the child’s life. Does that describe what exists between a husband and wife? Certainly the intensity of love no doubt. But there is something else in a marriage, something that doesn’t exist between a parent and a child regardless of such intense love. A love of a parent towards a child is one of consideration, constant consideration. But the two – parent and child – remain separate entities. In a marriage the consideration is not that one is considering the other as separate from oneself, but rather as one would consider something – someone – who is now part of oneself. I’ve crudely and amateurishly likened this as perhaps akin to overlapping circles in a venn diagram – two intact circles that now share part of what they are with the other. A mate in some ways has become part of your own identity.
There is the call . you live the sacramental marriage and then your wife is taken away and you are left it seems alone with out the heart of the family.
Yes indeed Alan. Everything changes.