The Meaning of Marriage
On October 31, marriage was in the news: Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphreys were getting divorced. It was a sad spectacle, and though celebrity marriages aren’t exactly known for their longevity, at 72 days this one’s brevity got people talking. "I hope everyone understands this was not an easy decision,” Kardashian said in a statement. “I had hoped this marriage was forever, but sometimes things don't work out as planned. We remain friends and wish each other the best."
Less than a week later, surrounded by our families and many of our closest friends at a little garden oasis in North Phoenix, Katie and I made audacious promises to each other: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”
Today is day 73, and by God’s grace, we’re just getting started.
In that week between October 31 and November 6, as it happens, Timothy and Kathy Keller published their book The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Dutton). My good friend and groomsman Barnabas gave us the book as a gift.
The book is remarkable in all the ways that books on relationships and marriage so often fall flat. Tim and Kathy have no patience for clichés, but instead share their wisdom rooted in three significant things: 37 years of marriage; more than 20 years of ministry in a city (NYC) and a church (Redeemer) largely made up of single people; and last but not least, the Bible’s teachings on the meaning of marriage, and what it has to do with all of us. In the introduction, they write:
It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience. If you came from an unusually stable home, where your parents had a great marriage, that may have “made it look easy” to you, and so when you get to your own marriage you may be shocked by how much it takes to forge a lasting relationship. On the other hand, if you have experienced a bad marriage of a divorce, either as a child or an adult, your view of marriage may be overly wary and pessimistic. You may be too expectant of relationship problems and, when they appear, be too ready to say, “Yup, here it goes,” and to give up. In other words, any kind of background experience of marriage may make you ill equipped for it yourself.
That may seem like a bit of a downer, but really I think it emphasizes that none of us can assume that a good marriage just happens automatically, and neither can any of us assume that a great marriage is out of the realm of possibility. Throughout the book they show how marriage is designed to be, and indeed can be, great. As a marriage newbie, I didn’t read the book to critique it so much as to soak it in and learn from it, so I won’t dissect it point by point here. Instead, I’ll simply recommend it as what seems to me to be an honest, encouraging, well-informed and well-rounded book for all of us, single or married, old or young.
I particularly appreciated Keller’s interview about the book on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in November.
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I love how he re-frames some predictable (and, yes, leading) questions from the panel, refusing to play the culture wars blame game while also challenging the nearly universal assumption that marriage is designed primarily for our own self-fulfillment. As he writes in the book, marriage is “difficult and painful -- yet rewarding and wondrous.”
I'm glad I read the book so early on in marriage, and I plan to return to it again and again.
For more, check out this one-hour conversation with Tim and Kathy, as they discuss the themes of the book and tell stories from their own experience.
[Photo credit: TimothyKeller.com]
Rainer Maria Rilke on love
From Letters to a Young Poet (Norton) by Rainer Maria Rilke:
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is --: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent --?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (‘to hearken and to hammer day and night’), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough...
The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, -- then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
What do you think of Rilke's understanding of love? How does it correct common misunderstandings of love today? Where might it come up short?
Bob Dylan on celebrity and the good life
Bob Dylan writes about life in the tumultuous late 60s, a time of such great political and social unrest, with many considering him the face and the voice of an angst-filled generation. Having moved with his family to the small town of Woodstock, his life as a celebrity had become an unwanted burden. It’s a good dose of reality for those who hunger and thirst for power and fame. The good life is found not in the bright lights, Dylan would suggest, but instead among family and good friends, cultivating faithfulness, putting down roots.
Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X... I didn’t see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty. I was determined to raise my children with those ideals...
As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of...
People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat -- someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad...
I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.
From Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster), pp. 114-118.
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