Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.
Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.
Priest (or deacon): You have declared your consent before the Church. May the Lord in his goodness strnghen your consent and fill you both with his blessings. What God has joined, men must not divide.
Congregation: Amen.
Groom (placing the wedding ring on his wife's ring finger): (Name), take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Bride (placing the wedding ring on her husband's ring finger): (Name), take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
-Rite of Marriage
With these words, a man and a woman commit themselves together, for life, in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. A bond that is formed out of love for one another and a bond that is unbreakable in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, in the eyes of today’s present society, a couple can “fall out of love”, obstacles may arise that neither party was ready for, or many other unexpected things. And when everything starts to fall apart, it’s acceptable to give up, get a lawyer, and pretend nothing ever happened. But this isn’t Marriage. Marriage is for life. Marriage is for the “good times and in bad”, and for keeps.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics (a branch of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the divorce rate in the United States alone was 53% in 2010. This statistic should cause a cold chill to run down the spines of all Americans. 53% of American marriages end in divorce. (CDC) Something has to be done. Most of these good-willed people have entered into this bond (some sacramentally) out of love for one another, what is driving them apart? Whatever it may be, the couple needs to back up, re-examine the vows they took, find in those words the love that they had for one another, and re-commit themselves to the love they shared when they entered into this unbreakable bond. This is the simple, yet complex, remedy for the situation we face.
Imagine a couple, newly wed, moving into their home for the very first time…their wedding night. Mister and Missus are filled with the new excitement, knowing they can finally live together in complete love. They have a very romantic evening planned and will be leaving for the honeymoon in a couple of days. Is this not one of the most beautiful sights the world has to offer? Committed to God, committed to the community, and committed to one another this man and woman begin their life together. But the honeymoon ends and soon the once sparkling idea begins to tarnish. What happened? This question has a very simple answer; life happened.
Examine the poem Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden. The story goes something like this; a father wakes up before dawn to a cold house, wrestles with his clothes, and stirs up the fire so that his kids can have a warm house to wake up to. Soon the son wakes up…slowly, taking pauses at every available opportunity. He goes into the main room and finds his good shoes polished and shined. (Hayden) The father in the story has it pretty rough, there seems to be tension in the house, he works all day, and it seems the son is ungrateful. But he keeps going, but why? The father keeps going out of love; he realizes that no matter how hard life can get for him, he wants his kids to have the very best in life, so he does his very best to give them what he can.
Perhaps the best summary of love gone un-noticed is this section from Barbara Kingsolver’s Stone Soup:
I started out like any child, intent on being the Family of Dolls. I set upon young womanhood believing in most of the doctrines of my generation: I wore my skirts four inches above the knee. I had that Barbie with her zebra-striped swimsuit and a figure unlike anything found in nature. And I understood the Prince Charming Theory of Marriage, a quest for Mr. Right that ends smack dab where you find him. I did not completely understand that another whole story begins there, and no fairy tale prepared me for the combination of bad luck and persistent hope that would interrupt my dream and lead me to other arrangements.
Like a cancer diagnosis, a dying marriage is a thing to fight, to deny, and finally, when there's no choice left, to dig in and survive. Casseroles would help. Likewise, I imagine it must be a painful reckoning in adolescence (or later on) to realize true love will never look like the soft-focus fragrance ads because Prince Charming (surprise!) is a princess. Or vice versa. Or has skin the color your parents didn't want you messing with, except in the Crayola box.
It's awfully easy to hold in contempt the straw broken home, and that mythical category of persons who toss away nuclear family for the sheer fun of it. Even the legal terms we use have a suggestion of caprice. I resent the phrase "irreconcilable differences," which suggests a stubborn refusal to accept a spouse's little quirks. This is specious. Every happily married couple I know has loads of irreconcilable differences. Negotiating where to set the thermostat is not the point. A nonfunctioning marriage is a slow asphyxiation. It is waking up despised each morning, listening to the pulse of your own loneliness before the radio begins to blare its raucous gospel that you're nothing if you aren't loved. It is sharing your airless house with the threat of suicide or other kinds of violence, while the ghost that whispers, "Leave here and destroy your children," has passed over every door and nailed it shut. Disassembling a marriage in these circumstances is as much fun as amputating your own gangrenous leg. You do it, if you can, to save a life--or two, or more. (Kingsolver)
If life could get any sadder than what is described in these three paragraphs, it must not be livable. Waking up every morning alone, hated, or feeling worthless is probably the worst feeling in the world. One could compare this to the night and morning after a bad break up, one that the hurt is so deep that you literally spend every second you have by yourself mourning the lost possibilities, lost love, and seems worse than a lost life. But if we apply this to a marriage sort of relationship the cause of the feelings of loneliness and worthlessness would have to come from some sort of fight or neglect. Is a married couple really going to let that stand in the way of their love that they have for each other? Kingsolver says, “Disassembling a marriage in these circumstances is as much fun as amputating your own gangrenous leg. You do it if you can, to save a life—or two, or more.” Is it really saving a life though? Are we, as a society, really going to discount love that quickly? Unfortunately we are, but it needs to stop. If a couple wants to quit a marriage because of a stupid fight, a bunch of shouted words that go back and forth, forget any awesome memories, kids, self-fulfillment for both partners…then it would be better if the couple had not entered into this deep of a commitment.
The main reason all of this happens is the closed communication between couples. If couples were completely open with each other from the get-go, it would not be impossible for the national divorce rate to come down. Most fights would cease, not all, but most. But we, as a society need to step back and examine our priorities when it comes to relationships. If someone enters into a relationship with another human being, only seeking to gain personal pleasure or wealth, they need to get out of that relationship. That person is using their significant other. They are, in a sense, treating the other person like an object…an object that is meant to serve them and bow to their every will. That is not what a relationship is, and in the larger scope of things, it is not what marriage is. The perfect analogy would be the whole idea of Making Love, the marital act that continues to call a couple back to the first time they were together in that capacity, the act that reminds them of the love they share for one another. In today’s society, we see Making Love as involving two people…but it involves three. First the Man, who seeks the good of his wife, seeking to fulfill her the best he can. The second player is the Wife, who seeks the good of her husband, seeking to fulfill him the best she can. The third, and often forgotten player in this truly divine act, is God. Yes the man and woman fulfill each other, but society can sometimes forget that we, as humans, are supposed to serve and glorify God in every way we can. Is there a more perfect time to praise the Lord, than when a man and his wife become one flesh? No, because in that instance we take part in something of which it’s incredible beauty is not of this world.
Love in a sense is an emotion, one of the most powerful God has given us. But Love is a person, God. A marriage must be founded on God, because He is the fullest Love imaginable. Love and praise God through your spouse, be led by the spirit to your partner’s arms, and when you arrive there, thank God for His loving embrace embodied at this moment by the arms of your lover.
No comments:
Post a Comment