Marriage and Divorce

G.K. Chesterton had quite a lot to say on the subject of marriage and divorce. The quotes below are mainly from The Superstition of Divorce which was written in 1920. The others are from The Hebdomadal Chesterton which is a wonderful place to visit if you like Chesterton.

Of all human institutions marriage is the only one which most depends upon slow development, upon patience, upon long reaches of times, upon magnanimous compromise, upon kindly habit.

...marriage itself is an act of freedom and responsibility; and the desertion of it is the desertion of one’s self; and is always at least humiliating. Even if divorce is not a sin, it is most certainly a disgrace. It is not like the breaking of a chain, which has been forcibly imposed upon a slave. It is like the breaking of a sword, that has been deliberately taken up and deliberately dishonoured by a traitor.

As a child of divorced parents his words on disgrace made sense. In Chesterton's day divorce carried a  greater stigma than it does today, but for a child the sense of disgrace is caused by rejection. 'If my mum and dad really loved me they would have stayed together.' The repercussions of  breaking the sword have a ripple effect and they are not something that a child would necessarily articulate or understand.

I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair of honour. The skeptic will be delighted to assent, by saying it is a fight.  And so it is, if only with oneself; but the point here is that it necessarily has the touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be translated by virtus. Now about fighting, in its nature, there is an implied infinity or at least a potential infinity. I mean that loyalty in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace; it is due to the flag precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls.

Marriage is honourable. 

It requires heroism at times.

Heroic: altruistic, determined, dauntless, brave, courageous but desperate.

In a medical sense a heroic procedure is one which may endanger the patient if it's performed. There's a chance it will  be successful but if it's not done the patient will probably die. Heroic effort and desperate action are honourable responses whatever the outcome might be in the end.

Virtus was a specific virtue in Ancient Rome. It carries connotations of valor, manliness, excellence, courage, character, and worth, perceived as masculine strengths (from Latin vir, "man"). It was thus a frequently stated virtue of Roman emperors, and was personified as a deity. (Wikipedia)

The dictionary definition states that Virtus comes from the root Vireo and implies strength from straining, stretching, extending.

The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason

The subtitle of this book is, Meditations on the Miracle,and it is essentially a meditative book - exquisitely so - and completely different to most books you would find on this subject, Christian or otherwise. 

J.I. Packer introduces the book by saying that if the author, a recently married student of his who wanted to be a writer, had spoken to him about using marriage as the theme of his first book, he would have pointed out that:

'Marriage...is a terribly difficult topic on which to write wisely and well...that the Christian world is already full of bad books in marriage...that young authors rarely write with any depth about relationships anyway...' etc.

However, Mike Mason did not consult him about what he planned to do, went ahead and wrote the book and the result, according to J.I. Packer, was an outstanding achievement:

Rarely...has a new book roused in me so much enthusiasm as has the combination of wisdom, depth, dignity, and glow - I don't know what else to call it - that I find in these chapters...

Their tone quality, resonating as it does off the Bible as its sounding board, is richer than we are used to...

This is one of those books that you need to go back and mull over. I've underlined so many parts of this book and there's so much I could share but at risk of transcribing the whole thing, I'll limit myself to a few quotes:

  

A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one's living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going - to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door - the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic: but also, let's face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.

What is most unique about the tenacious fidelity of marriage is that it allows for such a really brutal amount of "sharpening" to take place, yet in the gentlest way imaginable. Who ever heard of being sharpened against a warm, familiar body of flesh? Only the Lord could have devised such an awesomely tender and heartwarming means for men and women to be made into swords.

The Lord God made woman out of man's side and closed up place with flesh, but in marriage He reopens this empty, aching place in man and begins the process of putting the woman back again...

Marriage involves a continuous daily renewal of a decision which, since it is of such a staggering order as to be humanly impossible to make, can only be made through the grace of God.

To put it simply, marriage is a relationship far more engrossing than we want it to be. It always turns out to be more than we bargained for. It is disturbingly intense, disruptively involving, and that is exactly the way it was designed to be.

The Mystery of Marriage was first published in 1985 by Multnomah Books.

Sanctification in the Commonplace

Sanctification:

The act of making holy.

The act of God's grace by which the affections of men are purified or alienated from sin and the world, exalted to a supreme love to God.

Marriage has been called a long path to sanctification.

I used to be concerned about working this sanctification out in front of our children, day in and day out. My husband and I are very different in personality, which makes life interesting; and we come from disparate backgrounds, which has caused us to misunderstand each other at times.

We've been married for nearly 27 years and for 25 years of that time our children have had occasion to witness our long path to sanctification. We've had a few momentous events throughout those years where it was obvious God was doing something significant in our lives and our children benefited from what we were experiencing. However, we were largely unaware of the myriads of times sanctification was going on because it was wrapped up in the very ordinary and commonplace and sometimes didn't look very pretty, and it certainly didn't look holy.

What is hard about marriage is what is hard also about facing the Christian God: it is the strain of living continually in the light of a conscience other than our own, being under the intimate scrutiny of another pair of eyes.

For marriage inevitably becomes the flagship of all other relationships. One's own home is the place where love must first be practiced before it can truly be practiced anywhere else. No one likes to be out of joint with a good friend or with in-laws or with an employer, but such problems at least can be tolerated. Yet any little thing that comes between a man and his wife is capable of wrenching them apart inside, and if that is not the case, then it can only be due to the growth of a callousness in them which cannot help carrying over into all their other relationships.

The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason

Last weekend our eldest son got married and during his wedding speech he shared an incident he'd witnessed on our long path to sanctification. It went something like this:

"When I was about 8 or 9, mum and dad had an argument when we were all having dinner. Dad said something silly and Mum got upset and left the room. Later that evening they were sitting up in their bed and called us all into the room and they both apologized to us kids for not showing love to each other earlier in the evening."

He went on to say that this episode cemented something solid into his life. Mum & Dad were committed to each other, with God as the ultimate authority, and the fact that we were submitted to Him helped embed a deep security into his life. This was a foundation we'd given him that he knew would be a bedrock for his own marriage.

It was very humbling to know that the Lord is so gracious and can use even our stuff-ups, weaknesses and failures  - the ordinary, common things of life - to sanctify us, and our children; to make something beautiful and lasting, an inheritance of grace to be passed on to the next generation.