I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but somehow, I wanted to say a lot and wasn't quite sure I could pinpoint it all in one place. I'm still not sure I can get everything down, but I thought it might be good to start somewhere.
For some reason, I've always thought that marriage was a cop-out. That ideally a Christian should remain unmarried so as to be fully disponible to whoever or whatever needs them at that time. Because of my catholic background, I have seen celibacy done extremely well. I don't know what it was exactly, but I think it was a willingness, on the part of the priests I've known, to remain thirsty for human love, which enabled them to love and fully welcome anybody.
I've personally benefitted a tremendous lot from it. My family of origin was sometimes rather cold, At a very young age, I would be left to amuse myself in my own rooms all evenings and all weekends. I was a moderately well-adjusted kid, not all that popular. The local catholic church really welcomed me, my questions, my awkwardness, the full person. Anybody who's been near a priest-led Roman Catholic chaplaincy in a university setting knows exactly what I'm talking about. The three Roman cathoic priests I know well are the most welcoming people I know.
So marriage really didn't see like the best Christian option at all. And for a while I thought that God was almost anti-marriage. All that talk about leaving behind your wife and kids to follow Jesus and proclaim the Gospel left, right and centre and getting yourself killed somewhere far away. I actually always felt sorry for the wife and children left behind.
Georges Bernard Shaw also wrote a fantastic essay about how marriage and the Christian life are not compatible in his preface to Androcles and the Lion :
When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the same objection to that individual appropriation of human beings which is the essence of matrimony as to the individual appropriation of wealth. A married man, he said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman to please her husband, instead of doing the work of God. This is another version of “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Eighteen hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus, Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this, though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be a moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he forfeits that right when he marries.
And yet despite these objections, and despite my desire to do something really different with my life, along the lines of the life of Henri Groues for instance, deep down I had an intense, irresistible desire to love and to be loved as part of a couple. I grew dissatisfied with just loving God. While God was the source of all the love I knew, the excusivity felt misdirected somehow. Surely the love I had in store should be lavished onto another person, that way it would flow out into creation more. I used to beg God to let someone human benefit from that love too.
I developed a weird theology of "being in love" while being single. I used to say to myself that you didn't need to wait until you had a human partner to be in love. That wouldn't be fair on singles. They can be in love too. Just be in love beforehand. With God, with life, with people... Maybe someday a partner will want to climb into that love affair with you.
When I met H., his warmth felt qualitatively like God's. I couldn't believe it. I didn't think it existed in humans and I was not expecting it, but it was the same thing which I had first discovered in prayer a decade before. And I thought that if that love was available to be lavished on me, then yes please! It was fairly instinctive. I didn't think I was a great lover of people, but I was willing to learn. Some Foreigner's lyrics come to mind.
H. didn't thave the right politics though. He was all about getting more bums in the pews and didn't give a monkey's a** about liberation theology. I still had nagging doubts, right up until my actual wedding day. I thought that I was giving up on another, more beautiful vocation which I had neglected to fully explore. It was a real struggle.
At some point, we attended an awesome and highly recommended Anglican marriage preparation weekend. There were about twenty couples about to marry, and while the weekend is not designed for couples to share information with other couples, the body language of the other participants was incredibly beautiful. Their obvious delight, love and trust for one another brought me to tears a number of times.
At this point I thought that if God really wasn't in the marriage business, then God ought to be. All this love breaking forth out of vulnerable and broken individuals looked a lot like Heaven to me. You could see healing taking place right here and there. Everysingle participant ended up tearful at one point or another, including the freaking leaders. So H. and I ended up picking the Wedding at Cana as our Gospel reading. Because maybe God was in the marriage business after all or at least didn't object very much to weddings.
After the wedding, I thought "okay sainthood's not happening now". On a day-to-day basis my commuting expenses are very high and this leaves me without a lot of money to play with at the end of the month. I'd quite like to own a house at some point, I'd quite like to have an income in retirement, I'd like lots of free time and lots of rest after work, and I don't always have the mental and emotional energy for much social engagement. All in all I'm just another brick in The Wall.
Add children to that mix, or early pregnancy at any rate, and I don't even have the energy to even think about it. All I do is work and sleep. I'm still painfully aware of all the things I don't have the resources to change, and I can't think of a way out. Slowly, the flame is dying within me and I find myself giving up. I don't talk about Tony the homeless guy anymore. I don't talk about liberation. I give up.
And then, something stupidely psychological occurs. H. calls me at work and says:
H: Bradford's right next to Leeds isn't it? Because in Bradford nearly all the churches have teemed up together and they take turn to make their building available for the night to those who are roofless. Do you think that through your job you could have access to these guys?"
I: What for?
H: Do you think you could find out how they do it. Particularly health and safety?
I: Why do you want to know that for?
H: Well so I can reproduce it. So I never have to turn away a woman with kids who's got nowhere to sleep and knocks on the door of my parish office.
In the three years we've been together, H. has resisted all my social engagement talk. And God knows there has been a lot of social engagement talk. And then he comes up with this stuff while I have been quietly giving up for the last three months.
At first I thought he missed that element of my character and was trying to fix me back to normal. But the impulse really came from him and I had been crowding it out, not giving him the space to explore his own feeling and spending all my time feeling outraged that he didn't share mine.
The less I talk, the more he does. The less I lead, the more he does. I unwittingly give him a three months break from my strident liberationist stuff, and the stuff blooms in him in a much more mature and thought-out form than it ever did in me.
So I can be myself, but take a break from what I'm usually on about. Begin to be interested in what he's on about. It's a refreshing little holiday away from my ususal self. And then I realise that it's truly me, with all the politics, that H. fell in love with.
*The title is a passage in the Italian Roman Catholic liturgy of marriage. It means "the way of their sanctification", and points towards marriage as one of the ways of life you may choose (as an alternative to celibacy) and that this way can and should become the way of your sanctification.
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