43. On Marriage.

Dearly Beloved,

In a few days time my wife Josephine and I hope to celebrate 50 years after our first meeting and 43 years of marriage; we married on the same date that we met at a party, but seven years later. After all that time I can only reflect that marriage is an extraordinary manifestation of human-kind involving huge intimacy, energy, tolerance, understanding, empathy and hard work.

When I thought about marriage, it became clear that it is a very difficult subject to think about and discuss. That is partly because many people survive well without embracing marriage at all and because of the diversity of experience of those who do marry; to some extent each marriage is unique. Today about 58% of marriages persist and do not break up and those involved in break up frequently try again.

Genesis (2:18) portrays married partners as helpmetes; I remember a couple from south west France celebrated when the wife died aged ninety. She had been left running the farm after the death of both her parents when she was fourteen years old. She was helped by the paid farm hand who was the same age. They ran the farm together, married and stayed together to old age. A marriage of necessity perhaps, but it was clear, very much a treasured relationship. Another example of overcoming difficulty was that of my own parents. My mother worked for the WRAC in Portsmouth whilst my father was at sea during WW2. He was guarding convoys of food and arms vital for British survival during the war and there was a continuous period of three years when they did not see one another. During that period his ship came in to Portsmouth for emergency repairs just once, but left after 48 hours with no shore leave being granted. I can hardly start to imagine how difficult an experience that must have been for both of them. It makes our present difficulties of socially isolating pale into insignificance. When he eventually returned my mother said he was a stranger. Thereafter they remained married into old age when she nursed my father before his death from Parkinson's disease.

A long marriage may be based on necessity or the bedrock that mutual support brings in our competitive and demanding society. Those who care for married partners who are invalids, or children who will never become independent encounter special difficulties and they are worthy of special respect. If one partner has parents who were made intensely unhappy by break up and divorce, then there may be a strong motivation in both partners not to repeat that experience.

Nevertheless despite its demands, marriage is a relationship full of possibilities. There is a paradox about marriage and love which my daughter set out clearly when composing a wedding address for her brother a few years ago. She summoned the support of the Christian philosopher Hegel

“Love is the ultimate contradiction. Because when we love we no longer wish to be, as he puts it, a self-subsistent and independent person, instead we feel defective and incomplete on our own. And yet in loving the other person we are paradoxically returned to our own independent self, now made in some sense whole and capable of true independence, through our unity with, and love for, the other.

Perhaps many people marry because they are uncontrollably in love, but if they are fortunate they may be able to look back upon a lifetime's project mutually undertaken, each partner like one of two authors who write a book together. That work must acknowledge the integrity of each whilst taking account of the sacrifices of each on the other's behalf and on behalf of any children that may be born to them; a project which has the potential to develop and change throughout life.”

There is also the public dimension, for married couples are rarely isolated these days and the modern marriage service also emphasises that every member of a community has a duty to support couples in their marriage. Rowan Williams says “I simply don't think we'd grasp all that was involved in the mutual transformation of sexually linked persons without the reality of unconditional public commitments: more perilous, more demanding, more promising” than any transformation of two people alone.” (The Body's Grace)

And then there is the family and the relatives. I have always been grateful for my own wife's promise “... Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

The most significant present we were given on marriage was a garden spade with a ribbon around the handle. We recognised the implications immediately. We are still clearing new ground, planting and harvesting.

Deo gratias!

Paul

Completed 5th Novmber 2020.

Photo: Paul Munton.

Adam and Eve meeting God by the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden,  12th century Carving over the porch of the church at Besse, Dordogne, France

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