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fpbA few months ago, I wrote an essay on the Catholic doctrine of marriage - http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/84324.html. Among the responses, this one by rfachir stood out for its length, eloquence and passion. Why any couple would want to be married is beyond me... Please disabuse me of these shallow, sad thoughts... In the perfect world to which the writing aspires, everyone would endevor to live in such a way as to bring heaven to earth. But I don't live in that world and I've never seen a perfect marriage, in any culture or religion, close enough to say "this is the divine plan." I'll just argue what I know - not the Living Church but the living marriage.
There is nothing in heterosexual unions that comes close to the heavenly union. Ours is not the constant perfect understanding that God has for us, nor the perfect love. We may aspire to it, and imagine it, but we fall short when it comes to "making the word flesh." We either make compromises to ensure that the marraige survives, for the sake of the divine sparks in our care, and because in the end that is what we see as a higher purpose, or we don't. But to say that how we touch ourselves or each other has any impact on how close we come to touching God is a joke.
God loves us too much to set us up like this. Jesus may have talked the talk - you know better than I - but he never walked the walk. Marriage is not Holy Orders. "Thou art a husband forever" never came into the picture. The codification of marriage isn't a divine institution - we're still practicing serial polygamy. We're so far from God's love in that single, man-made, political and material union that I don't even want to contemplate what soul-destroying power we're trying to paint it over with. These "shalt not"'s are a man-made crock. The marriage I'm living in has just as much to be penitent about as any homosexual union. Caving into sinful desires isn't limited to fornication, and fornication isn't limited to un-married or sterile intercourse.
God is love - I agree wholeheartedly. But to say God is marriage is another thing altogether, right up there with God is government (which also used to be a popular sentiment). God the Father is an incarnation I can agree with, but not God the husband.
Please please convince me otherwise. Writing this has left me unusually bitter, and I honestly don't think I have anything to complain about.
As I told her at the time, she was asking quite a bit of me. And I do not know that I can do anything towards it now, any more than I could then. But I do not think that that exempts me from making, at least, a few points.
One red herring is better got out of the way first. Jesus did not have to "walk the walk". Jesus was God; "he who has seen Me has seen the Father". As we on Earth understand difference, there was no difference between Him and God. And I argued that the "image of God" in which God made man was the unity of man and woman. In what sense this is reflected in Jesus, I do not want to speculate. As a man, as a member of the human race, he was male; as God, he was - God. He was the fullness of being.
But to us feeble ones below, everything comes as if from a great distance. There is something that I have already mentioned: In a very imperfect world and a fallen mankind, however, understanding is not a steady light, but a fitful, ill-regulated, oft-obscured glimmer. Here we see through a glass darkly; it is only there that we shall know as we are known. This explains the agonizing phenomenon of delusive love, love for the unworthy...
You might want to ask, of course, if marriage is so unnatural a thing, why do all cultures establish it, pursue it, celebrate it? Above all, if it is so unsuited to our nature, why is it such a sad thing to you - something you describe with every evidence of sadness, even of heartbreak - that it should be so? Clearly, because it is something that is in itself beautiful and attractive, and whose opposite is instinctively felt to be ugly. Your imagination instinctively seizes on the fertile union of a woman and a man as something that it would be lovely to have, were it - you would say - only possible.
What I described in my article was something like an archetype of marriage, a vision of an idea - an attempt, in fact, to locate exactly that particular thought, that particular vision, that seems so beautiful, even to you, that its apparent impossibility among men leaves you feeling sad and negative. It was not, or at least not primarily, aimed at describing how marriage actually exists in the circumstances of ordinary life. And that being the case, you ought to reflect on the relationship of archetypes, of ideals, with actual daily life. Take the police. Do you imagine that policemen and women ever do really see themselves as what they ought to be - the thin blue line, the last bulwark of peaceful society against chaos, perversity and evil? Goodness, do they ever not. Many of them, perhaps most of them, when they ever do think of such things, only lament at how far beneath the ideal they fall. They know that many of their colleagues, are lazy, incompetent, or on the take, or all of those things at once. They know that they fail so much more often than they succeed. They feel that time goes on and slowly grinds them down, and the same old everlasting evils just repeat themselvs again and again. It will often be the best, and not the worst, of them, who will find themselves asking: "Is it even worth it?" And yet - remove the idea that is always at the back of their minds; remove the archetype that is only partially actualized in the uniforms, the badges, the signs of authority and service; remove the image that they had in their mind's eyes when they first chose to be policemen and women rather than any other job; and see what happens!
The ideal, the archetype, is the spirit that gives life to every institution. Do most teachers ever stop to think that they stand at the solemn hinge of time and life, passing on the life and achievements of the dead to those who have only just begun to live? Do they ever think of their work as solemn and sacred, a service to wisdom as well as to society? Hardly. How many doctors see themselves in the image of the sworn guardian of others' bodies, committing the best of mind and soul to the healing of others? Hardly any - consciously. And yet, again, where would any of these professions be, with all the good they do for society, if the archetype did not live somewhere behind all the dreary, boring, wrong-headed, bull-headed, idle, mistaken, or plain dull events of the ordinary working day?
You may still say that I gave too high, too luminous an idea of something which is never, or hardly ever, seen in the real world. To this I have two answers. First, we say that marriage is a sacrament: and there can hardly be too high, too noble a description of a sacrament - something which is the presence and work of God on Earth. Second, I never married, and not for want of trying. Therefore I have that right of the loser to claim a clearer view, of which Emily Dickinson spoke:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires a sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of Victory,
As he defeated — dying —
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear.
rfachir stood out for its length, eloquence and passion. Why any couple would want to be married is beyond me... Please disabuse me of these shallow, sad thoughts... In the perfect world to which the writing aspires, everyone would endevor to live in such a way as to bring heaven to earth. But I don't live in that world and I've never seen a perfect marriage, in any culture or religion, close enough to say "this is the divine plan." I'll just argue what I know - not the Living Church but the living marriage.There is nothing in heterosexual unions that comes close to the heavenly union. Ours is not the constant perfect understanding that God has for us, nor the perfect love. We may aspire to it, and imagine it, but we fall short when it comes to "making the word flesh." We either make compromises to ensure that the marraige survives, for the sake of the divine sparks in our care, and because in the end that is what we see as a higher purpose, or we don't. But to say that how we touch ourselves or each other has any impact on how close we come to touching God is a joke.
God loves us too much to set us up like this. Jesus may have talked the talk - you know better than I - but he never walked the walk. Marriage is not Holy Orders. "Thou art a husband forever" never came into the picture. The codification of marriage isn't a divine institution - we're still practicing serial polygamy. We're so far from God's love in that single, man-made, political and material union that I don't even want to contemplate what soul-destroying power we're trying to paint it over with. These "shalt not"'s are a man-made crock. The marriage I'm living in has just as much to be penitent about as any homosexual union. Caving into sinful desires isn't limited to fornication, and fornication isn't limited to un-married or sterile intercourse.
God is love - I agree wholeheartedly. But to say God is marriage is another thing altogether, right up there with God is government (which also used to be a popular sentiment). God the Father is an incarnation I can agree with, but not God the husband.
Please please convince me otherwise. Writing this has left me unusually bitter, and I honestly don't think I have anything to complain about.
As I told her at the time, she was asking quite a bit of me. And I do not know that I can do anything towards it now, any more than I could then. But I do not think that that exempts me from making, at least, a few points.
One red herring is better got out of the way first. Jesus did not have to "walk the walk". Jesus was God; "he who has seen Me has seen the Father". As we on Earth understand difference, there was no difference between Him and God. And I argued that the "image of God" in which God made man was the unity of man and woman. In what sense this is reflected in Jesus, I do not want to speculate. As a man, as a member of the human race, he was male; as God, he was - God. He was the fullness of being.
But to us feeble ones below, everything comes as if from a great distance. There is something that I have already mentioned: In a very imperfect world and a fallen mankind, however, understanding is not a steady light, but a fitful, ill-regulated, oft-obscured glimmer. Here we see through a glass darkly; it is only there that we shall know as we are known. This explains the agonizing phenomenon of delusive love, love for the unworthy...
You might want to ask, of course, if marriage is so unnatural a thing, why do all cultures establish it, pursue it, celebrate it? Above all, if it is so unsuited to our nature, why is it such a sad thing to you - something you describe with every evidence of sadness, even of heartbreak - that it should be so? Clearly, because it is something that is in itself beautiful and attractive, and whose opposite is instinctively felt to be ugly. Your imagination instinctively seizes on the fertile union of a woman and a man as something that it would be lovely to have, were it - you would say - only possible.
What I described in my article was something like an archetype of marriage, a vision of an idea - an attempt, in fact, to locate exactly that particular thought, that particular vision, that seems so beautiful, even to you, that its apparent impossibility among men leaves you feeling sad and negative. It was not, or at least not primarily, aimed at describing how marriage actually exists in the circumstances of ordinary life. And that being the case, you ought to reflect on the relationship of archetypes, of ideals, with actual daily life. Take the police. Do you imagine that policemen and women ever do really see themselves as what they ought to be - the thin blue line, the last bulwark of peaceful society against chaos, perversity and evil? Goodness, do they ever not. Many of them, perhaps most of them, when they ever do think of such things, only lament at how far beneath the ideal they fall. They know that many of their colleagues, are lazy, incompetent, or on the take, or all of those things at once. They know that they fail so much more often than they succeed. They feel that time goes on and slowly grinds them down, and the same old everlasting evils just repeat themselvs again and again. It will often be the best, and not the worst, of them, who will find themselves asking: "Is it even worth it?" And yet - remove the idea that is always at the back of their minds; remove the archetype that is only partially actualized in the uniforms, the badges, the signs of authority and service; remove the image that they had in their mind's eyes when they first chose to be policemen and women rather than any other job; and see what happens!
The ideal, the archetype, is the spirit that gives life to every institution. Do most teachers ever stop to think that they stand at the solemn hinge of time and life, passing on the life and achievements of the dead to those who have only just begun to live? Do they ever think of their work as solemn and sacred, a service to wisdom as well as to society? Hardly. How many doctors see themselves in the image of the sworn guardian of others' bodies, committing the best of mind and soul to the healing of others? Hardly any - consciously. And yet, again, where would any of these professions be, with all the good they do for society, if the archetype did not live somewhere behind all the dreary, boring, wrong-headed, bull-headed, idle, mistaken, or plain dull events of the ordinary working day?
You may still say that I gave too high, too luminous an idea of something which is never, or hardly ever, seen in the real world. To this I have two answers. First, we say that marriage is a sacrament: and there can hardly be too high, too noble a description of a sacrament - something which is the presence and work of God on Earth. Second, I never married, and not for want of trying. Therefore I have that right of the loser to claim a clearer view, of which Emily Dickinson spoke:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires a sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of Victory,
As he defeated — dying —
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear.
