"Marriage"

Well we are just under the 3 month mark of our wedding and I added some more "marriage stuff" to my previous collection of qoutes by Mike Mason in his book The Mystery of Marriage. Hope you enjoy; good stuff.


"Even when we do catch a glimpse of love, it is still miles ahead of us. It's because love, true love, sets people free to be whoever they are. But a thirty-year-old man is like a densely populated city: Nothing new can be built, in its heart, without something else being torn down. So I began to be demolished. That is one of the chief characteristics of love: It asks for everything. Not just for a little bit, or a whole lot, but for everything. And herein lies the battle. It is always some version of this tension between the needs for dependence and for independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency. No one has ever been married without being surprised, and usually alarmed,  at the sheer intensity of this invasion. For we are opaque, solid creatures; we resist being transparent. And yet this is what love asks for: transparency. For that is what love does: It brings people out into the light, no matter how painful that transition might prove to be. Love aims at revelation, at a clarifying and defining of our true natures. For suddenly there is so much to see! So much is revealed when two people dare to stand in the radiance of one another's love. Marriage is a choosing of the closeness of God, in the form of a close relationship with another person. It is a deliberate choosing of closeness over distance, of companionship over detachment, of relationship over isolation, of love over apathy, of life over death. It forever admonishes us that there is no such thing as life apart from relationship, which is to say, no life apart from the sharing of ourselves with another. Man was not to be an isolated creature, nor a whole horde of isolated creatures, but rather "one flesh". Like God Himself, then, marriage comes with a built-in abhorrence of self-centeredness. It attacks people's vanity and lonely pride in a way few other things can, tirelessly exposing the necessity of giving and sharing, the absurdity of blame. Angering, humiliating, melting, chastening, purifying, it touches us where we hurt most, in the place of our lovelessness. Dragging us into lifelong encounters that at times may be full of boredom, tension, unpleasantness, or grief, marriage challenges us to abandon everything for the sake of love. For this is just the sort of thing love loves to do. It loves to back us into a corner. It loves to rip out our independence like a rug from under our feet, and then stand back and watch what we will do. For love demands wholehearted commitment; it is never satisfied with just a little bit of a person's heart. For love is like death: What it wants is all of us. For marriage is a wild frontier, the most free and raw and unpredictable of all human associations, it is the outer space of society. And so the godless flee from marriage in droves. They flee in the sense of this: It is a vocation to total abandonment. Naturally those who stubbornly refuse to believe this will fail to experience the reality of it. But when they do love, that love becomes a fire that has the power to enkindle all around them. A fiery covenant. Far from being trapped, we are actually set free. If a couple were to seek the Lord with their whole will, rejoice in Christian fellowship, and spend time both alone and together in heartfelt prayer and study of the Scriptures, they would soon find their love life with a rich glow, finally ablaze. For only through wholeness of dedication can human life begin to approach holiness. From now on, the greatest part of all the "giving in" and "letting go" we must do in life will be done within the context of our marriage, as we surrender not only to the Lord but to our human partner, and as we are called on to let go not only of all the worldliness we ourselves cling to but of everything that clings to the other as well, every fleshy desire, every weakness, every sin. If it is hard to accept our own imperfection, then it is harder still to accept imperfection in another. Marriage reduces all decisions to one, one simple decision that must be made over and over, and there are no results more particular or far-reaching or catastrophic than the results of that initial and ongoing decision to invite one other person to interfere permanently in our lives. To love is to submit, and to submit is to love. Love asks: Can you love another person enough that you will consent to becoming like them? But before love can really begin to be love, it must face and forgive the very worst in the person loved. A Christian finds the strength to forgive. True submission is humility acquired on behalf of another. We must forgive, or in short, be destroyed. For when we forgive the unforgivable...we see Christ. And who He really is. And what He really meant by His death.Two mysteries that will help any marriage: One is shared prayer, and the other is unconditional love. Either we suffocate under all that is unbeautiful, unsuprising, unspectacular, ungraceful in our lives, or else we learn here and now to breathe the air of grace. In marriage, to put this thought into our homely language, we learn how to appreciate one another, to see one another as precious. We learn to love."

- Mike Mason (a rendition of the book)