Marriage and the Prospect and Promise of Marriage

Saturday, April 06, 2013.

 On the way to meeting up with God, I found he spoke to me before I should ever see the face of God, and in small and quiet ways the Deity asserted Himself and His predisposition for love as the greatest requirement of our common humanity.

[This being my treatment of the topic of marriage and its prospects.]

By Richard J. (Rick) Hilber

A broken heart is a terrible thing to mend, but it is required to live again, as opposed to merely surviving.  We have to heal in the broken places and grow strong, but the process is fraught with challenges.  Prayer and good times are prescribed antidotes to the poison that pools in our being when we are hurt.  This is especially true if the hurt be not dispersed and watered down to a painful memory with little or  no power over us.

Picture one of the most hurtful scenarios of our day and age, the parent who withholds approval of an adult child who enters into a marriage union, and even worse interferes in the responsible conduct of his or her adult child.  The parent has a broken heart over a life choice and only manages to alienate the adult child as a consequence.  No prisoners taken in this particular encounter, only banishment. 

However, there is something worse, and it would be in an adult child’s failure to be true to himself or herself.   The hurt that results is that prisoners are taken, sometimes spouses, and even more cruelly children who we could have empowered to live their own lives, make their own choices, and have their own consequences both good and bad.

We fault former lovers not for our having loved one another, but for proving all too human and short of our idealization of one another (which is to err on the side of objectifying the loved one).  Marriage is an undertaking that soon takes us to other quarters than any idealization of the "other" termed "romantic." 

Spouses in love with one another have transcended romantic love by loving the actual person (or not).  Freedom to go or to stay is an enpowerment that provides second life (and later lives) to mature spouses.  That's the commitment to relationship those who aspire to marriage want for themselves. 

They gladly trade in the rashness and intensity of romantic love episodes they may or may not have had for the prospect of actual intimacy and trust in another adult.  The intimacy and trust are as byproducts of marriage commitment the first children of every couple (regardless of gender assignments). 

Kudos to those with the commitment and passion for marriage and its rebirth.  Your marriage by definition can not be childless if you actually have a true marriage (and regardless of state sanctioned marriage provisions of the law, actual child progeny of the marriage, or child adoption). 

Persons who have true marriages or true marriage experience know of what I speak.  Let's not forget this commonality in the midst of enlarging the sphere of state sanctioned marriages and rights for all.

 

It of course makes me more than a little sad, that not all marriages are respectful and open to growth for both partners.  I have known a measure of success, but I also know the other side of the coin.  Divorce sometimes becomes an altered state of being when there are actual children of the marriage (but that’s a topic for another day).

As a parent and grandparent, I ask would I fail  my progeny (child, step-child, et cetera) for his or her marrying a person of the same sex?   The same can happen when an inter-racial marriage is undertaken but that one seems not to have much sway over me.  In Christian charity in answer to my question, I should say not.  I just hate it that my moral stances are so often at odds with institutions which I serve  and  honor with my  allegiance, church and country.  Again as an adult, I find I have no place to hide.

Here, I have tried to state my values as conservatively as possible, but in a manner which is respectful of persons different yet the same as myself.  This is not about hedonism or a descent into perdition.  Clearly it's about family values and the efficacy of covenant relationships into which even atheists can commit.  If married, you become fulfilled and evolved and you reach your potential, who is to say you are not the best promotion of the married state itself.  (Again, the efficacy of the single life is a topic for another day.)

As a Christian, I too experience sadness that the marriage covenant perhaps does not become the covenant of the spouses with God as the third partner, but the substitute of accountability of the spouses to one another is as good or better.  You be the judge, and I will be the respecter of your freedom to believe in God, or not. 

In my conservative spiritually, the assent or yes to God is obtained by commitment to my fellow human beings and when they fail me or I fail myself, it only serves to throw me back upon the mercy of God.  No easy out.   And definitely no embrace of hedonism.   The sacrament I am called to over and over again is to love God and love my neighbor and to forgive myself and others for the hurt that results of our common humanity.