Fifty Days of Marriage
Love is a mystery. No, when I say love is a mystery, I don’t mean that it is ever perplexingly out of my reach. Neither that it comes and goes where it will, nor that it causes people to do crazy things. Love is a mystery. It is the unearned gift of God. I’ve been married for fifty days. I never expected to say that. I never expected to be married, because for most of my life, love was, in the negative sense, a mystery to me. It was something external, a disembodied idea that I lacked, and frankly, was happy to lack. I didn’t understand love, and I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to get married. At the time, marriage meant giving up my freedom to do exactly what I wanted whenever I wanted. I’m going to praise marriage a lot, but I loved being single. People wanted me to go hang out? No thanks, there’s Downton Abbey to watch. Time alone is some of my favorite time, and when I was single, I was alone all the time, and it was great. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give all of that up to be in a relationship, let alone a marriage. While we were dating, my now wife gave me the greatest gift she could: time. Time for me to learn, and grow, and come to terms with love. Because for months I was still scared of losing the independence I felt as a single person. Ultimately, I was right about marriage, but thankfully, I was utterly, utterly wrong.
With time, I realized - not realized in the sense that I came to the right mathematical conclusion, but realized as the sun of love rose and bathed my life with new light - that I had everything completely backwards. Marriage is not about what you give up, it’s about what you gain. From the outside, I had no idea what there was to gain from marriage. Looking back, I can’t believe I thought I’d miss watching TV at midnight, alone. The difference is love. Love is a mystery. We have every reason to think of ourselves as independent beings. I am the only person with all of my experiences, thoughts, and emotions. When I get cut, or stub my toe, I am the only person who feels that pain. Every morning I wake up in my own body, and go about my own day. But love has the mysterious power to break down the reasonable, completely natural impulse to put ourselves first. I’m not worried anymore that I can’t do whatever I want whenever I want, because what I want to do is love my wife, and mere independence is silly and trifling compared to the richness of knowing and being known forever to the infinite depths of our existence. Now, I want to bring my wife tea to her desk in the morning. Usually, I’m compulsively possessive about my privacy, but my wife wanted to share her thoughts about marriage (here they are), so I wanted to, too. I want to do anything I can to make her day.
Love turns us inside-out, and that is the great mystery. St. Augustine says our fundamental condition is that we are curved in on ourselves. Martin Luther writes that our nature is to “so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.” Love bends us away from ourselves. Our wedding liturgy says marriage “signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church.” God, through a long struggle, first opened me to love, and through the wonderful mystery of my love for my wife, I even better understand the ineffable mystery of God’s love for us.
My desire for independence has often been selfish, just as my relationship with God was selfish for most of my life. I knew the Bible, I went to church, I knew theology, but I did not have love. In this loveless state, I was left with the cold logic of transaction. My creed was Pascal's wager. If I believe in God and God is real, my reward is infinity. If I believe in God and God isn’t real, my reward is zero. If I don’t believe in God and God isn’t real, my reward is still zero. But if I don’t believe in God and God is real, my reward is negative infinity. So, the obvious choice is to believe in God. My relationship with God, the Creator and Lover of the world, was like the prisoner’s dilemma. I’m in a bad spot and drowning in despair, so I might as well take what’s best for me. I sought all things, even God, for my own sake. I was without love, and the union between Christ and his Church was just words on a page.
Negative theology holds that we can have no positive understanding of God. Since he is so far above us, and because he defies all of our conventional distinctions, we cannot say what God is. We can only say what God is not. God is not, for example, an old man with a beard in the sky. Generally, I like negative theology, because it appreciates the great mystery of God. Isaiah writes this great paradox of God,
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
God transcends the boundaries between holiness and immanence that we can’t see past. Augustine writes, “that serving God is perfect freedom,” running roughshod over our conceptions of service and freedom.
But there is something we can say about God that unknots these paradoxes: God is love. The fullness of God is not merely love, but the full measure of love is found in and comes from God. Because of his great love for us, he mysteriously emptied himself of his own holiness, and dwelt with us through Jesus Christ His Son. He continues to dwell in us though the power of the Holy Spirit. Love turns God towards us, overcoming everything, even the paradoxes that would keep him from us. I don’t really know how to explain what happened, but God came to my lowly spirit and revived me. It changed my life. Suddenly, I was not concerned with what I got out of my relationship with God. All I wanted was God, to love him because he first loved me, but even beyond that, to love God, because God is God, to love him because of who he is. My response of love untangles the second paradox. Of course serving God is perfect freedom, because what I want is God. His will becomes my will, not out of domination and fear, but because I love God and want to do anything I can to make His day.
Marriage has been a deepening of the well of love, sprung by the grace of God. Through my union with my wife, I better understand how God loves His Church, and how the Church can love Him. My favorite line in the marriage liturgy says, “The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy.” As our union is a reflection of the union between God and His Church, we, too, are united with God for our joy, and for his joy. What a wonderful blessing! It’s been just fifty days. Some circumstances have been challenging, and I’m sure hard days are still to come. That said, those hardships are immaterial to our mutual joy. Love is both the mystery of God and answers the mysteries of God. Through His grace, we are able to say that our marriage is a foretaste of that marriage of Christ and his Bride. In loving one another, we are sanctified and participate in God’s plan of perfect redemption for the universe.
