Christianizing marriage

Marriage is not coextensive with sex life, even with a perfect sex life; nor is the topic of Christian marriage exhausted with a discussion of Christian sexuality. Of course, books on Christian marriage talk about much more; but I think that a good deal of what is said confuses Christian love with that affectionate "loving relationship" which can be Christianized, but is not itself Christian.

Christian love for one's spouse is God's love: infinite respect for the true reality of the spouse. But the true reality is not an ideal; it is what is there at any stage of the marriage. All too often, God is pictured as an idealist, who has the saint in mind as the "really real" spouse, and who enlists the person as an "instrument" for helping that saint come into existence. This is the serpent's idea of the true reality, not God's; it is thinking in terms of good and evil. Christian love is acceptance.

Let me do a little exegesis of a Biblical text: that of St. Paul to the "Ephesians" (which is probably to Laodicea, but let that ride), in Chapter 5 (I won't mention the verses; if you want to look it up, then you might have to read more than just the verses in question, which will be a good thing, because you'll see the context).

"Give way to each other out of respect for the Prince's authority. Wives are to submit to their own husbands as if they were the Master; because the husband is head of his wife more or less in the sense in which the Prince is the head of the community: he is the one who keeps the body safe. But in the sense in which the community listens to the Master, wives are to listen to their husbands in everything.

"Husbands, you are to love your wives in the same way as the Prince loved the community and surrendered himself for it, to make it holy by washing it with the bath of the water that has the sacred words said over it, so that he could set the community beside himself as something full of dignity, something holy and stainless, without any spot or wrinkle or anything of the sort. This is the way husbands ought to love their wives--as if they were their own bodies. When a man loves his wife, he is loving himself; and of course no one hates his own matter; he feeds and takes care of it, just as the Prince does for his community, because we are organs of his body.

"'With this in view, a man is to leave his father and mother and attach himself to his wife, and the two will become one living body.' Something very profound is hidden in this; I mean the relation between the Prince and his community; but in its literal meaning it says that each of you must love his wife as being his own self; and the wife is to have respect for her husband."

This, particularly by feminists, is taken as the rantings of Paul, and is cavalierly dismissed. I think it deserves a serious look.

First of all, wives are to submit to their husbands in the way the community submits to the Master. Not in the way a slave submits to his master, but in the way the Christian community submits to its Master. But how do we as Christians, submit to God? We do his will. And what is his will? Our own will. This is what I have been saying all along. God has no "plan" for us that we must carry out in spite of ourselves; he created us free for us to use our self-creativity as we please.

The difference between this and self-centeredness is that the wife, like the Christian, develops herself out of love for her husband, because she knows that his happiness consists in her fulfillment. Just as I develop myself, not because God has "given me talents and expects me to use them," but because I love God who has given me talents, and I use them because I love the one who gave them to me, even though I realize that he will not be disappointed if I don't use them; so the wife fulfills herself, not because her husband will be angry or disappointed if she doesn't, but because he will be happy if she does.

Far, then, from a prescription to enslave, the "submission" Paul talks about is true emancipation. The feminist is emancipated--from enslavement by her husband, because she thinks the husband is using her for his own sake. The Christian wife is emancipated from any kind of slavery, but she does this through her husband, not against him.

And husbands are to love their wives as the Prince loved the community. But Jesus loved his people, first of all, by submitting to their reality, even to the extent that this submission brought about his death by people who mistakenly thought they were doing the right thing. Secondly, he submitted to the community as to his own body, which it is, because it lives with his life.

Now the wife does not really live with the husband's life, and so this, as Paul says, is only an analogy. But the point is that if the husband loves the wife and has the wife's goals for herself as his goals for her; then her reality as an independent person is in fact a part of his spiritual life; and in loving her this way, she in fact becomes his own reality. That is, if her goals as hers are also his goals (the effects he wants to happen from his choices), then part of his fulfillment is her fulfillment; he is frustrated if she cannot achieve her goals for herself; and hence his reality depends on hers; she is part of his eternal reality.

So his love for her is not the love of a master for a slave; it is the love of one who submits to another, and who respects the other's independent reality.

Essentially, both work out to be the same thing in practice. Each sees the other's happiness in his own fulfillment, and each develops himself out of love for the other.

The point here is that Christian love of one's spouse is not "togetherness," but letting be. The "union" comes precisely out of the letting the other be herself, not by interfering but by being there to assist when needed. God answers prayers; he does not force himself on our attention "for our own good." Like a good waiter at a dinner, he is there when we need him, and in the background when we don't. He does not "check up" on us, but is by no means indifferent to us. He does inform us when what we are doing contradicts what we are; but what he does is inform, not persuade or cajole or push. If there is one thing God is not, it is "pushy."

Now this means that the Christian has to fight against his own notion of the spouse's "true reality," as well as his notion of how the spouse could make his own life easier. It is one thing to accept another person in spite of her faults, and another to accept her with her faults, so that her faults become properties and are not faults. That is the goal of Christian sanctity in marriage, because it is the epitome of love of another as God loves.

And as to what is to be done, the burden is light and the harness fits easily. First, the course of action that seems to bring about the greatest objective benefit is the one a person would take, whether the benefit comes to the self or the spouse. If the benefit is to the spouse, the lover is happy doing it, because she is benefitted; if the benefit is to the self, the lover is happy because the spouse will be happy at his benefit.

That is, to reject the more reasonable course of action because it benefits oneself more than the spouse is not Christian; it is what Auguste Comte called "altruism," where the other is the only "real" reality. That kind of self-sacrifice is lack of respect for oneself, whom God loves infinitely, and consequently is lack of respect for God. This rejecting of the more reasonable course because of the benefit of another is love, but it is not Christian love. Christian love is not "altruism"; it is respect for reality, including one's own.

Obviously, however, this adoption of the "more reasonable" course of action is to be undertaken simply by oneself only in trivial matters; in anything that makes a real difference, the refusal to consult one's spouse is an imposition of one's own values upon the spouse, assuming that she will take as the "more reasonable" course the same one one has chosen. But "more reasonable" in this context means "better": what leads to a goal that is "more important." But as I have said so often, there is no real objective "better," or "more important," because these deal with ideals, not facts. Hence, what is the more reasonable course of action to one spouse is not necessarily the more reasonable to the other. Therefore, some sort of accomodation must be reached.

But how is this done? By deferring to the other. Each spouse should be willing to consider the other's values as values that can override one's own--always supposing that the other's values don't involve a contradiction (as when the other thinks that something morally wrong is all right--as, for instance, if the wife, not realizing that anything is wrong with it, wants to use contraceptives or even wants an abortion. You can't defer to her values in a case like this.)

Generally speaking, the two partners will not be alike in wisdom; and which one has the greater wisdom will be evident to both, whether or not it is explicitly stated. The one whose wisdom is generally greater, then, will listen to the other, because one can always be wrong; but the one with lesser wisdom will be more ready to give in, having once discussed the matter.

When one of the partners is adamant, whatever the wisdom of the matter, the other will be ready to give in. What, in the last analysis, does it matter? That the wiser course of action be in fact taken, with the other dead against it, or that the more foolish act be taken and both partners happy? What is done passes; what is chosen is eternal.

There is an enormous amount that could be said on this subject, I suspect, if one were to spell out all the implications of what I have mentioned above. But this is supposed to be a preface to the lay life, not an exhaustive treatise on it: something to point the way, not something to put every yellow brick in the road.

I am not going to say anything about Christian parenting, except to mention that the Christian parent respects his children for what they are: persons, but persons not yet in a position to exercise their freedom rationally--but developing toward that state. What to do based on this respect can be found in child-care books (which are often a good deal less sloppy than books on Christian marriage); these acts are Christianized by the attitude of respect for the reality that is there.

And that is the point, really. Christianity is a question of attitude, not a question of what you do. The attitude of divine respect is complex as it works itself out into action; it is all too simple to do what is hard and think that because it is hard it is God's will in this vale of tears. It is complicated to enjoy life--to enjoy reality for what it is--because this means seeing things in a new way, though the actions themselves are easy and even pleasant.

The "Christian witness" that this phase of life provides, then, is that Christians, taking over God's attitude of infinite respect, not only for their partners and children but themselves, can enjoy every aspect of marriage and parenting in a way that the non-Christian cannot, consistently with his non-Christianity.

The Christian before marriage can enjoy sexual attraction and not be afraid of messing up his life if he sins; the atheist, if he is to be consistent with his nature, must be concerned that the urge does not lead him to do something inconsistent--because he knows of no salvation, once he has been immoral. If he is to enjoy himself freely, he must (as so many do nowadays) try to pretend that things sexual are not really what they are, and that "mistakes" are just social faux pas, and are not "really" dishonest.

The Christian contemplating marriage can make the leap of faith with confidence in God that he will be able to live up to his commitment. The non-Christian has no one to be confident in but himself and his partner.

The Christian wife or husband is not interested in satisfaction, but in the other's fulfillment, in the Master, and is capable of letting go and not trying to subordinate the other to his idea of her "real self." The non-Christian must put up with things as they are also; but finds this not fulfilling; and if he is, in the last analysis, all that matters, how can this be happiness?

And at the end of life, the Christian knows that his beloved, who is still a very real part of his reality, is a living person, now with everything she chose as her goal--and in fact, everything she was willing to accept, as well as living the Divine life of infinite happiness; and the Christian knows that he is present to her, and she will be present to him eternally. "You may have died; you have only begun to exist." He knows that she is now the plant that was produced by the seed she was when she lived with him, and that he will become a plant growing beside her in the Master's garden.

The atheist, however, must face the dilemma that his present love for his dead wife is just as real and vivid as it was when she was with him--if not more so; but now (he thinks) he loves what does not exist; he loves only his image of her. But since the love is the same, was not his love for her all his life only his love of his experience of her, and not her real self? He thought he cared for her; but his present "caring" seems to be saying that he really only cared for his consciousness of her. Love has turned into a sham; he never loved her; he only loved his love of her.

But he can't believe this; and so his life cannot be reconciled into something that makes sense.

And he looks at the Christian, and says, "If only it were true! Life could make sense if it were true; but it's too good to be true; life is really hell, and these people make it out to be something beautiful."

And if he sees the Christian's life making real sense, he might say, "But why can't it be true? If Jesus came back to life after dying, then it might be true. Did he really come back to life? Can life make sense? Can I be saved from my hell--the hell I made for myself?"

The Christian preaches, in other words, by living. And Christian marriage is perhaps the greatest preaching there is; but it is simply by loving one's partner and children as God loves, not by being "virtuous," that the preaching occurs.

It is the attitude, not the actions, that makes the Christian. What you do can be found in books of morality (at least what you avoid); but the point is to see things differently, not to follow a set of guidelines.