Sometimes it seems like our whole culture is aligned against the deep commitments of a marriage that lasts over many years. There are rough patches that can last months, that are just that-rough patches and not the truth of the marriage. There are reasons why you chose that person, that are perhaps deeper than you first thought. With Bruce, my body sang to him, the first night we stood under a tree in Rockton. My body was wiser than all the lists I made out when I prayed, telling God who I was looking for in a husband. Even though his silence can sometimes leave me lonely and reading too much Facebook, I am grateful I didn’t marry a chatterbox. Well, here’s a perspective I wrote for WNIJ, our local NPR station. While I was warming up from a walk in the cold, I watched CBS This Morning. The hosts were interviewing Oona Metz, a therapist who’d written Unhitched: an Essential Guide to Divorce. “Divorce is painful at first, but women who divorce find themselves transformed. Women are throwing over thirty, forty-year marriages.” Another time they discussed Strangers, a memoir about marriage heartbreak. CBS gave them ample airtime. CBS promoting a practice that breaks hearts and spins families apart left me empty, wishing I could watch a story about the transformation that long marriages can bring. Then I opened Substack to Sherman Alexie love poems. (Sherman Alexie is the author of the classic The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the writer/director of The Business of Fancy Dancing.) Here’s part of one called To Be Continued: “Listen, Listen. Most people Still want to get married. Most people still want to have children. We humans are not so different than hummingbirds and brown bears. I’d often dreamed of being a groom during my childhood. And now look at me sharing this house—sharing all these rooms with my wife and sons. I want my descendants, the grandchildren of my grandchildren, to study the old photographs of my face and see their eyes and nose and hair. I want them to hang family portraits in their homes and say, “That one there with the big chin, he’s the tall Indian who loved to write poems.” I’m Katie Andraski with Sherman Alexie and that’s my perspective. 1 . Bruce and I celebrated our fortieth anniversary by going to a greasy spoon out in the country. The place was packed with the local farmers and fun to look at, especially their trucks in the parking lot. I wanted to save calories for chicken marsala and cannoli cake at our local Italian restaurant. The day was gray, with dripping rain. And sad for me. My tears rose like the water running through ditches. Maybe not for you, but these big anniversaries can do this, because there is pressure to be happy, and sometimes the day is gray, the wind is cold, and the argument silent. I believe the pastor who married us, my spiritual director, and Bruce’s mother when we announced our engagement were concerned our match wasn’t quite made in heaven. Bruce’s pastor noted how difficult it would be for Bruce’s mother for Bruce to move out of her house and told her the choice was hers to make this either a heaven or hell. He asked if Bruce would mind if I made more money than him. I never did. My spiritual director knew about my horrible dating pattern. To him it seemed I was bouncing from one inappropriate man to another because Bruce and I got engaged and married in less than a year. Bruce’s mother nudged Bruce saying, “She’s intelligent.” But I found Bruce is just as intelligent as I’m supposed to be, but his smarts are in his hands. I found we are in step with each other as far as the important things—loving God, loving creation, living simply. I was relieved he was a Lutheran because as a Christian, liturgical worship made the most sense. Being a former evangelical I don’t think marrying one would have been a good thing. It’s been forty years of blessing each other, learning how to love who is in front of us, not our imagined idea we first fell in love with or who we think our beloved should be. I learned that full frontal conversations did not work. I have learned to leave our marriage in God’s hands because only Jesus is powerful enough to pull him, to pull me out of the grave. In the meantime, we bless each other, and occasionally say the Daily Office. Like a friend who asked her husband to read to her, I have needed Bruce’s voice saying those old words that speak of God’s goodness. Those old words are more than just words, though saying them feels ordinary, maybe even boring. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been together longer than my parents have been part of my life, that Bruce has been more family to me than they were able to be, simply because of length of time and faithfulness. As John Behr says in From Adam to Christ: It is, as we have seen above, in laying down his life that Christ shows us what it is to be God and what it is to be human. Our existence as male and female is in fact the horizon in which we (or at least most of us) learn, through the power of erotic attraction, to lay down our lives for another: through the erotic drive deeply implanted in us by God, we are drawn out of ourselves, to “die” to ourselves and to live our lives in virtue of another. As Dionysius the Areopagite puts it, “The divine erotic force also produces ecstasy, compelling those who love to belong not to themselves but to those whom they love.” In marriage, then, male s and females are, quite literally, “human-ized”!2 In another place, Behr says, “Marriage becomes a form of martyrdom as we learn to die for ourselves and live for another.”3 Remember it’s martyrs who are held in high honor in heaven: Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah.For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.11 They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony;they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them!But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you!He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”4 While I know this talks about believers literally dying for the Lord, sometimes brutally, I think it can apply to us, as we learn to die before we die, in the crucible of a marriage, with another imperfect, quirky human, our love calling us to become truly human as Jesus became in his life, death and resurrection. I have seen this with Bruce’s willingness to serve me. I used to feel uneasy about this because the therapists would say he should develop his own life, but maybe doing chores and making dinner is how he becomes fully human and like Christ himself who took on the form of a servant. During a recent rough patch, a friend said we should see a counselor because ways we relate sometimes devolve into dusty roads that go nowhere and they hurt. She didn’t want to see me hurt. Yes those roads sometimes lead us to oak groves, trees too big to cut down, that we thread our way through. Sometimes we sit down and lean our backs against them. Sometimes the woodland sweats, the leaves green and thick. Sometimes we walk along a logging road we cleared, to harvest lumber to build furniture and warm our home. When we renovated our house, when our university endured a mass shooting, when I’d hit my head on black ice, the world swimming, and I was shattered, we tried marriage counseling. It wasn’t long before I fired the counselor, even though we were fighting. A carpenter who worked on our house said each marriage has its own ecology, its own character. Trying to fit that marriage into what a counselor thinks is healthy, is not necessarily what is healthy for the marriage. During that time, I found Dr. Fred Luskin’s Forgive for Love and grabbed ahold of his advice. You need to appreciate your partner in three different ways, in order to truly foster forgiveness between the two of you. The first way is to recognize the specific good your lover does for you. Look for all the ways, both big and small, in which your lover serves you and makes your life better… The second way to appreciate our lovers is to look for the good they do in the world by acknowledging the help they give to other people… The third way to appreciate our lovers is to look for and praise their good qualities by telling them how much we admire how they think, behave and react. We need to appreciate the everyday good qualities that often go unnoticed like honesty, thrift, gentleness, courage and kindness.5 Sometimes when the rough patches like a tangle of raspberry bushes, burdocks, and weeds wrapped around my legs and stuck to my arms, I’ve asked for prayer from Majik and his wife. Their prayers have been particularly powerful in Bruce’s and my life. They’ve cut away the tangle. We speak simple words to God, and He works more powerfully than we can imagine. Stephen Robinson’s Stealing Paradise, an essay about deathbed conversions versus long lived conversions was like a machete clearing the weeds wrapped around my feet. So, the metaphorical reality of salvation for most of us is more like living out a passionately begun, illusion lost, knuckle down, gut it out, joy and sorrow, love/hate, war and peace, willful, stubborn perseverance of a long haul, daily same-old-same-old, hill and valley, fifty-year marriage relationship. That is a lot different “work” than a last ditch, desperate “Hail Mary” when you have no other options but to go for it, hell or high water... and by the grace of God he catches your toss and you “win”. Then, to boot, you are made a saint by the church for it!5 A few paragraphs later he says, In the end salvation is as simple (and as hard) as this: Learning humility to
