Marriage and Spirituality
Here is a recent column by James Howell, former pastor at Davidson United Methodist now at Myers Park United Methodist in Charlotte. He makes the case I have made many times before about the spiritual connection between marriage and one’s own spirituality. Enjoy.
Today, Lisa and I celebrate our 32nd anniversary. I'm a lucky dog. I've been thinking about marriage and prayer--but not anything like "the couple that prays together stays together." I know couples who've prayed plenty, and the marriage splintered; and I know couples who've never once prayed together, and they have thrived.
I'm thinking instead of the image of marriage as one that helps all of us, married or not, to pray. Marriage is the making of a deep, lifelong commitment--not just to stick together, but to share, to listen. Isn't prayer a lifelong manifestation of a committed relationship to God? Paul (Ephesians 5) can speak of the way a marriage symbolizes Christ's relationship to the church. Jesus, interestingly enough, performed his first miracle at a wedding he attended with his mother (John 2).
Many years on our anniversary, I will retrieve a marvelous poem Wendell Berry wrote about his continuing love and commitment to his wife--and his words say all we need to know about how we continue to talk with God.
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
God can feel hidden, or taken for granted, day by day--and yet God is always as close as the beating of your own heart. What is prayer, except choosing again what you chose before? At some point, you started talking to God, believing in God, offering your life to God. Each time you pray, you make that choice all over again.
The world knows a foolishness which grovels after whatever is newest and shiniest. Wisdom trusts what has withstood the tests of time; wisdom is continuing to choose the good and to go ever more deeply into that good that is life with God.
There's another poem Berry wrote about marriage, this one about his parents, after they both had died and were buried alongside one another in the cemetery.
They lived long, and were faithful
to the good in each others.
They suffered as their faith required.
Now their union is consummate
in earth, and the earth
is their communion. They enter
the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease.
Lovely--and again, these thoughts can be for us a vision of prayer, and especially the outcome of a long lifetime of prayer. We are faithful to the good in God, and God is faithful to us. The goal in prayer, today, is rest: Jesus said "Come to me all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). We get a taste, maybe of that rest. But as we grow older, and then in the hour of death, we finally, after our long striving, realize that "perfect ease" that is our eternal life with God.
And so today we pray, choosing again, trusting our rest will finally be perfected.
