Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

May 12, 1996

"When I say 'I love,' it is not I who love, but in reality, love who acts through me."
Robert Johnson

In the past twenty-five years or so marriage has undergone a profound transformation in this country. Traditionally, marriage was held together by family, religion, and law--but these forms reflected a more elementary grounding: simple economic survival. Since women had few opportunities in the workplace, they depended upon a man for their livelihood; leaving was unthinkable, since they had no place to go, especially if there were children to be concerned about. As late as the 1940's some school systems wouldn't let women teach if they were married. But now it is the rule rather than the exception for women to work outside the home. For the first time in our history, marriage is purely and simply voluntary. And everybody knows that, including our children. And they, and we, have a deep and abiding anxiety about marriage. We know that half of our marriages don't last. And the cost of divorce is tragically high--on the partners themselves, on their children, and on their broader community of family and friends. How do we make marriage work, in such an age, in such a time?

Some couples begin by trying to protect themselves in that most contemporary of all ways--the legal contract. Galen Guengerich, minister at All Souls in New York, recounts the story of Teresa Garpstas and Robert LeGalley. Before they were married last year in Albuquerque, NM, they filed a notarized prenuptial agreement at the city hall. In it, they agreed to each receive an allowance of $70 per week to cover haircuts, eating out, gifts for friends, and spending money. They also agreed to spend $5 for birthday gifts to nieces and nephews, to send each of their parents only a card on their birthdays, but to spend between $30 and $120 for their parents' Christmas presents.

The section of the agreement titled "Sex and Child Care" is equally specific. "We will engage in healthy sex three to five times per week. Teresa will stay on birth control for two years after we are married and then will try to get pregnant. When both of us are working, Teresa can have only one child. When one parent is free, Teresa can have another child. When both of us are free, Teresa can have one more child. After the third pregnancy we will both get sterilized."

Then there's the section on "Personal Conduct." "On weekdays, we will turn out the lights by 11:30 p.m. and wake up at 6:30 a.m." (They'll be lucky to sleep that late, if they have three children!) "When driving," the agreement continues, "we will stay one car length away from other cars for every 10 mph. We will buy supreme unleaded fuel (Chevron) and won't let the fuel gauge get lower than half a tank." Their agreement concludes with a statement of supreme irony, no doubt lost on these two: "We will provide unconditional love and fulfill each other's basic needs." Good luck, Teresa and Bob!

I want to grab these two and say, "No, no, you don't understand! Marriage doesn't have to do with rules and regulations, doesn't have to do with controlling your partner! It has to do with trust, and it has to do with faith, and above all, it has to do with mystery, and being willing to enter into the mystery of life."

I know that now. I didn't know it when I married. I married because it was time to get married, because I was afraid of being left out, because I wanted a home and a family, because I wanted love and security, because I wanted respect. In other words, I married out of fear and need. I could not bring my self to this joining, because I was afraid of who I suspected that self was. So I stopped writing in my journal, stopped praying, stopped teaching, and set about being "a good wife," the way the books and movies told me to be, the way my mother wanted. My husband loved me--as much as he could. But mainly, I felt, he needed a wife to make a nest for him and to have his babies. As a young surgeon, he had a plan for his life, he had a slot to fill called "wife," and I was it. I became depressed, and began writing again. Writing as a subversive activity. Once I began to find my security in myself, instead of outside myself, the marriage was gone. In one sense, it was one of the casualties in an age of transition from old values to new. And yet some couples made it through this cultural transition, and we did not. I will own my part of it--I think I did not know how to love myself, and therefore was not able to love anyone else, not even able to choose someone I liked instead of someone I needed.

And so let us begin by saying, beware of false expectations. Your marriage will not save you from yourself, nor will it solve your problems of being, or of meaning. You don't want to be lonely? Marriage will not take care of your loneliness--your loneliness comes from a place beyond good company. You want a home? Your home is an extension of your heart space, and you can surround yourself with the most beautiful things and the finest books and the latest in cooking equipment and never have a home, a place to receive others. You want a good sex life? Forget technique, forget perfect bodies, forget about somebody else giving sexual pleasure to you. You need to be alive and present in this world, to feel your own erotic powers, and sexuality then becomes one expression of that power as you are fully present with your partner.

Marriage is about mutual care and serving. It is often about putting the partner's needs before your own. I hesitate to say this, because women have too often been placed in the dubious position of the "second sex," in Simone DeBouvoir's words--that is, having the man at the center, and having her life at the periphery, revolving around his. But hear the word "mutual"--in a good marriage, the two partners honor and serve each other, both wishing the other's happiness, both bowing to the other's need. I was struck last year by the Tygers Heart production of The Taming of the Shrew , staged by our own Jan Powell. I thought to myself, now how is a strong feminist like Jan going to present this play? When Kate is finally "tamed" by being dragged around bodily and half starved, she submits to her husband, only to have him drop to his knees before her and declare his love and absolute service to her. The message for me was that love is mutual devotion, mutual respect.

Author Elizabeth Berg reflects upon her parents' marriage, as she prepares for their 50th wedding anniversary. "How did they do it?" she wonders. As she watched them that day, she began to understand that what had kept them together through times not always ideal was their own acts of simple kindness to each other: she pours his coffee; he drops her off at the door of their church on cold winter mornings. Berg says, "The lesson my parents' endurance has taught me is that it is not grand and glorious passion that makes a marriage work but the small daily gestures . . . that say, 'I still care.' And it turns out that those things have less to do with storybook romance than with recognizing the unique individual you married." She continues, "It is wonderful to get a bouquet of flowers from my husband, but it means even more when he gets me aspirin for my cramps. I can take my husband out for a fancy dinner, but it will not give him as much pleasure as my telling him that he looks sexy in his ratty pajamas. In a world that can feel cold and hostile, the value of marriage is that together, you can create islands of comfort that can sustain you. The trick is remembering to do it."

Marriage has to do with trusting. 'Til death do us part. A committed relationship provides constraints which make it possible to explore a much deeper and more profound relationship than would otherwise be possible. John Welwood sees marriage as a "mandala" (which literally means "orderly world), a sacred context in which a couple sets boundaries that keep them safe. Welwood speaks of marriage as a container of trust, in which the two parties can risk being fully who they are. The promise is "I will not go away." This quality of trust is shaken if one of the partners is always using the "divorce trump card," to gain power or advantage.

If a partner has an affair, this container of trust is damaged badly and sometimes broken beyond repair. I have wondered why this is so devastating to the parties involved, and I believe that it is because our intimate relationships more than anything else in our adult world recapitulate the relationship we had with our mother, when we were small and vulnerable and unable to live without her protection. So when we allow ourselves to be once again be held in somebody else's arms, flesh to flesh, we experience again that terrible and wonderful vulnerability. But we connect it with our very survival. And so if that partner betrays us by lying to us and abandoning us, we experience the most primal kinds of responses of anger and fear and grief. If you're going to be married, you need to wear the ring.

George didn't know that, in his marriage to Betty. He didn't know that a partner needs to be respected and cherished. He was, after all, an important man. A man who made a lot of money. A man with people to do his bidding. When Betty found out about George's affair, she confronted him. And he tried to explain, he tried to placate her. He told her, "Never again." But it was the car that did it. The next day he came home at noon with a smile on his face. He came in and jingled a set of keys before Betty's eyes. "Come and see, come and see!" he said, still smiling broadly. Betty opened the front door, and there she saw parked in their driveway a brand new Mercedes Benz convertible. "Thanks," she said. She took the keys and drove straight to her lawyer's office, where she filed for divorce. "The affair is one thing--but for him to think he could buy me off, that's just too much."

Marriage is about communication--but let's keep in mind that there are all kinds of communication. And behavior is a better indicator than words. Women tend to be more verbal, and they are dismayed that men often do not talk openly about their feelings. In same-sex relationships, this presumably is not the focus of so much conflict. Lesbians can talk to each other all they want, and gay men can do without so much conversational foreplay. In heterosexual couples, however, it is well to remember that men and women really are from different planets and to respect that difference. A light bulb came on when a very wise woman once said to me, "You can't expect men to act like your women friends." My aunt who died recently used to tell me how my Uncle Len used to pass by her chair and just touch her shoulder. He was a gentle man, a Quaker, and he didn't talk much. But in their silence, she felt deeply loved. The promise was there. He wore the ring.

Back to our young couple in Albuquerque, Bob and Teresa. They will most likely discover before too long that they can't control where their marriage goes, that they will in fact be walking in blindness and mystery. In his classic essay "Poetry and Marriage," Wendell Berry tells us, "The promise must be absolute, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown. . . . . What you alone think <marriage> ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you--and marriage, time, life, history, and the world--will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way."

Marriage is a sacrament--that is to say, a way to come to God. A way to realize the self. And a common commitment to a larger good. Not so much two people staring into each other's eyes, but two people standing together and looking out at the world. And so I would not necessarily say that happiness is the point of marriage. There is a deeper kind of joy and fulfillment, however, in the kind of ripening of the soul that marriage or holy union allows. If you do enter into this relationship fully, you will experience heights and depths of human experience that it is difficult to experience outside of marriage. You will be confronted with your folly, your selfishness, your pride; you will have to deal with depths of yourself that you never suspected were there, and your illusions will fall away. Marriage is not for the faint of heart. It is for people who are willing to be real and have all their fuzz rubbed off, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

And how do you do this hard thing? Rumi says, "To find the Beloved, we must become the Beloved." We must cherish ourselves, find ourselves precious and beautiful, and thereby allow ourselves to become a conduit for the love that flows through us to another. Love will be different from what the books say, from what the songs tell us, from what our hurting ego wants; love will be what it is, and if we receive it as a sacrament, we can embody it and it will live through us and bless the world. That is what marriage is about: loving out of the primordial flow of love in the universe and joining that love with a particular other and becoming one in your love, to bless a world that is hungering for it. It is a way of faith, of saying yes to the mystery, of entering the fire of our salvation. So be it.


PRAYER
O Holy One, may each of us here today, partnered or unpartnered, acknowledge that we live and move and have our being in your love. May we embody that love more fully as we seek to be your people. May we not turn from love in fear, but may we walk about with generous hearts and ready spirits. When love seems far away and we long for it, may we know that it is abundant in the universe. Help us to wake, and see.
So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.