An aspect of our society is to reduce everything down to the individual. Every man is an island and all that. On the other hand, we have that classic phrase from Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire: "You complete me".
What if a husband and wife were not just two people, two desiring units of indifferent gender, living for an indefinite time in the same house, but the perfection of male and female as if "marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman"? Perfection thus understood is not another form of individualism. When man and woman are made one flesh, they belong to each other. I am my wife's husband, and she is my wife – not just a little on the surface, or according to a legal contract, but to the very depths of our being. Likewise, I do not play at being father as a "role." I am a father. My wife does not play at being a mother. She is a mother.--Benjamin Wiker - The Meaning of Marriage
If marriage is to have meaning, we shall have to embrace again this revolutionary truth.
My folks get some satellite religous stations, including EWTN (the Catholic channel). I was flicking through stations and in between flicks, some preacher was saying, "Marriage is a covenant; as such, it is sacrificial".
ReplyDeleteThere is truth in that, I thought.
A good friend (who happened to be a divorced woman) once commented that she saw my wife and me as one person - we took that as a genuine compliment, but also as a deep responsibility. Of course, she hadn't seen our little spats behind closed doors!
ReplyDeleteAnother (younger) lady told us how her whole concept of marriage turned around 180 degrees after knowing us for a while. Her parents had divorced when she was a child but she still remembered the arguments etc.
My point is not that we're anything special, but that Christian marriages are under constant observation, whether you're aware of it or not.
To provide a bit of balance, our son-in-law once observed me being attacked with a wet tea towel (well-deserved, in all honesty), but he still went on to marry our daughter. Go figure.