Wrong Reasons for Marriage

Listening to an NPR report 

Unmarried With Kids: A Shift In The Working Class

I listened to stories of couples with kids saying things like,

"What's important is "having your life the way you want it, your lifestyle in place. Getting married is really the cherry on top." or "[Someday] I want to have that beautiful gown, and all the family, and toasts with champagne,"

I gather from listening to these couples that they think marriage is a ceremony or a lifestyle accessory.

I think we, as a culture, are letting these people down if that is what we are teaching them.

I come from a religious tradition that believes that marriage is a sacrament, a direct experience of God's love and grace through real experience. Marriage, as a sacrament, is an experience and participation in the love of God. My church teaches that the sacrament actually happens when two people make a lifelong and loving commitment to each other, not in the wedding ceremony. The wedding ceremony is the occasion when they make their commitment public, and the community celebrates and commits to support them in their relationship.

I wish that young woman would be moved to say instead:

"I want to be married, to have made that declaration of love and commitment, to commit lifelong support to my partner's growth, and to have the assurance of that commitment to me. I want to know I have the love and support of my family and community in creating this family."  

Isn't that better than a fairy princess wedding? Why aren't we teaching this about marriage?

Death Penalty a Mortal Sin

  Acts 7:44-8:1a 

"And you continue, so bullheaded! Calluses on your hearts, flaps on your ears! Deliberately ignoring the Holy Spirit, you're just like your ancestors. Was there ever a prophet who didn't get the same treatment? Your ancestors killed anyone who dared talk about the coming of the Just One. And you've kept up the family tradition—traitors and murderers, all of you. You had God's Law handed to you by angels—gift-wrapped!—and you squandered it!" (The Message, Acts 51-53)

This reading is the culmination of Stephen’s trial before the Temple Authorities. Stephen had been critical of the veneration and worship of the Temple, instead of God. His accusations offended the Temple authorities. They put Stephen on trial and Stephen presented a summary of Israelite history, a history of repeatedly receiving and rejecting God’s grace. Stephen accuses the authorities of following the same pattern in their execution of Jesus. Stephen’s accusations enrage them. So they killed Stephen, turning to sacred, lawful violence and death to relieve themselves from their distress.

I believe the death penalty is a mortal sin committed by our society. I would like to imitate Stephen’s structure of argument (without the name) calling to make my case. [I am indebted to the writings of Rene Girrard for the following interpretation.]

Holy Scriptures reveal our fallen tendency to turn to violence. Cain kills his brother Able (Gen. 4) in an attempt to relieve his envy and jealousy. Moses kills an Egyptian soldier in a rage over the violent treatment of an Israelite slave (Exodus 2:12). David, in an adulterous, lustfull, plot, arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). Elijah kills 450 prophets of Baal (1 Kings 19) in a zealous religious fervor. In all cases, the killers face their shame and God lets them live with the consequences. Cain gets separated from the presence of God but God loves him and protects him from others killing him in retribution. David acknowledges his sin to God and suffers through the grief of his son’s death. Elijah runs to the mountains and in his meditations realizes that God exists not in the mighty storms that characterized Elijah’s ministry but instead God is in the ‘silence’ (1 Kings 19: 12).

Holy Scriptures show us story after story of our attempts to use violence: sometimes explained by human failings; sometimes explained as acts of God; sometimes justified as religious zealotry. Again and again, violence fails to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Jesus’ execution, death, and resurrection are God’s ultimate revelation of the failure and futility of sacred/lawful violence and the resurrection shows God’s victory over redemptive violence. It is up to us to give up our culture of violence or God will continue to let us live with the consequences.

I write this meditation as part of the ministry of a congregation that choose Saint Stephen as its namesake. In what ways are we/you called to imitate Stephen, to name the sin we see in the world, to name it with Love, and challenge the world to do better?

"I'd pay not to go!"

I share that response with permission from the speaker. That response came during a clergy consultation group after I suggested the idea of a marriage weekend retreat for clergy. The idea spending focused intentional time, exploring and talking about our relationships repels us.

I don't find their response surprising. David Scnarch in  Constructing the Sexual Crucible, argues that most people can't tolerate very much intimacy. From my personal experience, I recognize my reluctance to look seriously at how I relate to my wife. I know when I honestly look at myself, I have to look at those things I do that have and do cause disappointment, hurt, and disconnection. I need to recognize her hurt and loneliness.  I have to face and acknowledge my shame and my loneliness.  I need to seek forgiveness and work towards reconciliation and reconnection. And when I do, I find great relief and great joy; incomprehensible joy and gratitude for her gift of love and connection.

In couples' therapy, I work  to help couples restore their connections of love and affection so they too may find their experiences of joy and gratitude.

I wish we all were less like my clergy friends. I wish we were less fearful of intimacy. Don't be afraid. Seek out a marriage enrichment group. Seek out a good couples' therapist. Start a couples' discussion group. Read a relationship book and share it with your partner (suggestion: Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson).

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Meaning of Marriage

I like to ask my clients in couples counseling: What is marriage? What is the purpose of marriage? What does marriage mean to you?

I want to take a stab at answering that myself.

From a psycho-therapist’s point of view (mine), marriage means a commitment of two people to love, honor, and cherish each other for a lifetime. Within and through those commitments, people grow more fully into ‘differentiated Selves’: Selves capable of empathy and compassion for each other; Selves autonomous from each other; Selves capable of giving safety, comfort, and validation, to each other; Selves in ‘effective dependence’ on each other.

Relationships go through stages of brokenness and rebuilding, crisis and development. During infancy, childhood, and adolescence, the Self develops through crisis and resolution of crisis, in relationship with primary care givers, siblings, teachers, and peers. The Self continues to develop through crisis and resolution during our maturity in relationship with intimate loved ones. Often, we reenact brokenness and failures of our developmental tasks of childhood in our relationships. As a couples therapist, I work to help couples get unstuck from old patterns and develop new potentialities for relationship and independence in their growth and development process.

As a pastoral counselor within a Christian tradition, I recognize the sacramental nature of marriage, something that leads to a deeper experience of the presence and grace of God. From this point of view, I believe that marriage leads to love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self. I also believe that growth as Selves and neighbors (partners, community) is part of the nature of God’s creation.

As a pastoral counselor, I am committed to, and love to, work with couples and help them grow into the people and the family they are capable of becoming. It feels much like a farmer preparing the soil and watching the miracle of life and growth take hold.

Struggle for Blessing

Genesis, chapters 31-33, tells the story of Jacob returning to face his older brother, Esau, whom he had cheated out of Esau’s birthright and their father’s, Isaac’s, blessing. Afterwards Jacob ran away in fear for his life. Years later, he goes back, fearfully hoping for reconciliation and forgiveness with his brother. The night before he meets Esau, Jacob spends the night alone, wrestling with a man (?), an angel (?), God (?). During the struggle, Jacob is injured but he continues to struggle demanding a blessing before he releases his opponent (?).

People seeking counseling and psychotherapy are often struggling with issues of guilt, grief, broken relationships, broken spirits, and/or broken bodies. It takes courage to come to counseling, prepared to engage in the struggle, knowing it may include facing real pain. It takes faith to hang onto the trust that there is a blessing to be claimed that is worth fighting for.

As a pastoral counselor, I believe in the hope of healing: physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual. As a pastoral counselor, I work to remember I am not God. I do not heal. Instead I strive to serve as God’s hands, ears, and heart, as a companion in the night of struggle, as my clients strive for blessings in their brokenness.

Freedom from 'Shoulds'

Squelching my anger sent me to counseling the first time. I grew up believing that good people don’t get angry. I believed I was a bad person if I felt angry, much less expressed anger. I thought “Thou shalt not get angry” must have been one of the Ten Commandments. My family taught me those beliefs.

I have since learned the Bible really teaches “do not let the sun set on your anger” (Eph 4:26). I understand anger as a God given alarm system to help me know something is wrong, something I need to pay attention to and resolve: either by giving up false hope and expectations, or by taking action to protect myself or to confront the threat.

The cognitive/behavioral schools of counseling teach that we suffer when we live by distorted thoughts and beliefs. These theories name “shoulds, musts, and oughts” as a type of thinking error. I lived by the thinking errors that 'I should not get angry.'

Sometimes we confuse the ‘shoulds’ we have been taught, (by family, church, culture) with reality. As pastoral counselors, we practice being sensitive and respectful of our client’s spiritual beliefs and emotional feelings while helping them to give up false and unhealthy beliefs, and to make life giving choices.

Attachment, Life Cycle and Spiritual Journey

The Buddha teaches that our suffering comes from our attachments to our ideas and beliefs about ourselves, the world, and they way things should be. To avoid suffering, we need to give up our attachments.

In a conversation with a Japanese Buddhist friend, he explained to me that in Buddhist cultures like Japan, they recognize that adolescents and people in general developmentally need to make attachments to family, culture, and self-identity before they move on in the spiritual journey towards detachment.

In the field of psychology, John Bowlby has demonstrated that secure attachment between primary caregiver (typically the mother) and child in early childhood gives children the security and confidence to grow into independence, exploring their world with confidence, and returning to the safety and protective field of the caregivers presence when needed. (as cited in Karen 1994)

Erik Erikson created the psycho/social model of development identifies various developmental crises that we go through on our journey towards our full humanity.(Newman) These stages are:

• Trust vs. Mistrust;
• Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt;
• Initiative vs. Guilt;
• Industry vs. Inferiority;
• Group Identity vs. Alienation;
• Individual Identity vs. Identity Confusion;
• Intimacy vs. Isolation;
• Generativity vs. Stagnation;
• Integrity vs. Despair;
• Immortality vs. Extinction.

Each of these crises could be interpreted as moving from a necessary attachment to detachment, which leads to developing the strength and resilience to prepare for the next stage of attachment/detachment crisis.

The Christian Myth (myth meaning a truth larger than the the story itself) demonstrates this reality in the movement of Jesus from birth to attachment to his Father God, and attachment to his ministry and friends, to his painful agonizing surrender and detachment from all of those: betrayed and abandoned by friends, mocked, scorned and tortured, and feeling abandoned even by God ("My God why have your forsaken me?"). All of this served as necessary steps in preparation for his new life as resurrected and living God.

Counseling sometimes accompanies people in their discovery of old attachments they need to let go of, discovering new stages of life and meaning and new attachments, of sometimes accompanies people through the painful periods, and always looks forward to new experiences, to resurrection, and to new life.

Karen, R (1994). Becoming attached: first relationships and how the shape our capicity to love. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Newman, B & Newman, P (2003) Development trhough life: a psychosocial approach. Wadsworth/Thompson Learning. Belmot, CA.