Christian Marriage Today: The Fantasies

Even though June weddings do not dominate local church calendars the way they once did (church weddings are now spread out more evenly across the year), I still find myself thinking about marriage more often in June than in most other months. This year, I've decided to think out loud, or more precisely, through the keyboard. The result will be three columns, this one and the next two. A warning: it might take still another June or two before my keyboard will let me quit harping on the subject.

Not long ago, starting a traditional marriage was an idea very much out of favor. Swinging experimentalism suggested that permanent relationships were heading straightaway toward extinction. The high divorce rate was scaring a lot of otherwise faithful couples off. (It's still too high, but at least it has leveled out.) For both men and women, getting a good purchase on separate careers made a lot more sense than getting a good rate on a joint mortgage. And living together first, ostensibly to get all the kinks worked out before closing the deal for good, often became just one more way of substituting unconventionality for commitment.

And now? Experimentation and exploration are proving dangerous and wearying. Rather than feeling more creative and genuinely intimate, a lot of people are feeling more anxious and lonely than ever. A while back, one high-wire, thirty-something friend said it well: I finally reached the conclusion that anything would be better than living this way, even getting married.

I wonder. In spite of some new-found interest in the old ways of marriage, many of the best and brightest among us are still clinging to expectations of what marriage should be that border on sheerest fantasy. For example, I continue to be regaled with pictures of marriage as the best compensation available for life's many hardships, such as money shortages, job losses, frequent moves, illness, and all around unhappiness in general. Or with naïve couples' eager anticipation of all that having children will do to make their lives less frustrating and more enhancing. Or, with romantic tales from the age of chivalry --- and their anti-matter versions from the afternoon soaps --- of preserving the quality of first love forever in a relationship in which each partner's every emotional need will be met perfectly.

Certainly, couples can become more resilient in their relationships by confronting hardships, but as a general rule, hardships are real bummers in adding zest to marriages. As are children, particularly too many of them too soon. Once, the fact that children were economic assets was all that couples needed to get busy being fruitful and multiplying. Today, children are major economic liabilities for all couples, and emotional ones also for those not mature enough to share love easily instead of demanding love greedily. Kids draw shamelessly on the emotional capital of their parents, particularly of parents already stressed out over their marriages and their lives.

The fantasy that the state of falling in love is a state that will last forever is a real humdinger of a fantasy, so much so that the very medievals who conjured it up knew better than to believe it. Back then, being beside yourself with feelings for another was confined to a partner not available either for intimacy or marriage. As the tale of Tristan and Isolde and lots of others like it cautioned, if you consummate a relationship fraught with longings like this, both you and your lover will surely die. Sadly, though, endless ecstasy remains a marriage ideal, and the predictable failure to achieve it overwhelms many lovers with disappointment, anger, and eventually, despair.

It is little wonder, really, that marriage relationships have been so volatile in recent generations. After all, what marriage could possibly fulfill the impossible expectations that many partners continue to hold for it? For all this, however, people continue to yearn for a quality of intimacy that holds out realistic hope of overcoming epidemic loneliness and meaninglessness rife in the competitive, consumption-oriented, winner-and-loser society we grandiosely offer the world as our crowning accomplishment and legacy.

And so, an even bigger question for all of us in the church: might the understanding of marriage that our tradition mediates have something after all to say to men and women who are looking desperately for more in marriage today? Our faith's answer to this question is a resounding Yes! In the next two columns, I'd like to share some thoughts about why the somber facts of marital instability and collapse that hit us in the face almost daily do not have to dissuade us from proclaiming this answer loudly and confidently.

Democracy as a World Mission

It is reassuring that experts on Iraq are questioning whether ensuring open elections is the best way to begin rebuilding the country. A lot of other things must happen first, especially along the lines of building an infrastructure with the kinds of checks and balances that have proved indispensable to democracy's successes world-wide.

The checks and balances recommended by our own Founding Fathers rightly presupposed that left to their own devices, most people will subordinate the public good to their own self-interest, and therefore need a system that makes it difficult for any one person, group, or arm of government to gain inordinate power over the others. You just can't trust anybody for very long, not our legislators, courts, and presidents, and not Iraq's tribal chiefs, her clergy, or even her people en masse. If there is ever going to be a strong democracy in Iraq, it will be because the Iraqi people learn to protect themselves from each other while still working together for the common good.

This rather somber assessment of human nature goes all the way back to Plato's late dialogue on the Laws. It is also solidly grounded in the Christian tradition, from Paul through Augustine all the way to Calvin and beyond. It is ironic, of course, that Calvin in particular, who of all theologians should have known better, set up a theocracy in Geneva, apparently excusing himself and his closest associates from the consequences of the original sin he taught about so well.

Even more ironic than Calvin's Geneva is the idea of a democratic nation imposing on a ruined dictatorship, as an alternative to a theocracy, a political system whose premises reflect an unashamedly Christian understanding of human existence in the world. It worries me what might happen when more of our leaders wake up to this idea. President Bush, of course, already gets it and is asking us, in effect, so what's to worry? For him, disseminating democracy to the ends of the earth does not seem to be all that much different from carrying out Jesus' Great Commission to take the gospel to everyone. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are very large differences between the two. It won't work to demand --- and here I borrow some words from a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. --- that all the different factions in Iraq simply sit down and work out their differences like good Christians.

If democracy in Iraq is to be something better than rule by random majorities, we are being told, the process of creating it will require will power, a lot of time and money, and the patience to cope with unanticipated dangers at every step. The primary reason given is that democracy is inimical to the history and mind-set of Middle Eastern peoples. I think the work ahead is going to be difficult for a different reason: as managers of the process, we do not now seem disposed to maintain a sufficient amount of mistrust toward either the Iraqis or ourselves.

What is especially striking about Iraq right now is the degree to which its various constituencies arrogate evils of every sort to people who are not like them, and reserve claims of righteousness only for themselves. In a word, they are especially adept at projecting onto others what they refuse to acknowledge in themselves. It's going to be a rough go persuading people to accept a checks and balances system of government who are unwilling to concede that anyone else might need some protection against them.

And what of mistrusting ourselves? We seem bent on creating a new Iraq in our own image, without factoring in all there is about our image that may not be worth perpetuating. Our greedy consumption of the world's resources, for example. Or our assumption of a Messianic role toward just about all the world's peoples. It's going to be a rough go granting Iraqis the major responsibility in rebuilding their own nation when we are unwilling to concede that they might need some protection from us.

It's hard to determine just how close the Mizpah of Genesis 31:49, whether it was a pillar, a town, or both, might have been to places we have been hearing about recently in Iraq. The covenant that Jacob and Laban entered into there, though, is very close indeed to the heart of the issues both we and the Iraquis must face in planning the country's future, together. The KJV got the meaning just right: "The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another." Otherwise, Laban's daughters, and the boundaries between the two mens' territories, will be perpetually at risk! Now that's the kind of thinking that may just get us somewhere after all.