13. Married but Alone
13
Married but Alone
If I try to write for all who experience aloneness in any form, I tread often on unfamiliar ground. I have not been there, and I cannot say, “I understand perfectly. I know exactly what you are going though.” In various wildernesses, I have found the companionship of Him who is “no High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses—he himself has shared fully in all our experience of temptation, except that he never sinned” (Heb. 4:15 Phillips). Think of it: Every one of our human weaknesses is intelligible to Him. He understands. He shares fully.
To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to have a Companion all the time. But that does not mean we will never suffer loneliness. In fact, it means that we may be lonely in ways we would not have been if we had not chosen to be disciples. When people who are contemplating becoming missionaries ask me, “But what about loneliness?” I tell them, Yes. You’ll be lonely. It’s part of the price. Strangers in strange lands are lonely. You accept that in advance.
As in discipleship, so in marriage. One of the surprises in store for most brides and grooms is that they are still lonely. A common but unreasonable expectation about marriage (and there are many unreasonable ones) is that the partner will now fill the place of everybody on whom one depended before—father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends. Because “falling in love” is an all-consuming, preoccupying, and exclusive phenomenon, it can be very hard on other relationships which no longer seem to be needed. But marriage teaches us that even the most intimate human companionship cannot satisfy the deepest places of the heart. Our hearts are lonely till they rest in Him who made us for Himself.
In a question-and-answer session at a women’s conference I was asked, What would you say to a daughter who is about to divorce her husband because he isn’t meeting all her needs? There was a ripple of laughter from the audience. The folly of such a demand! I said I would try to point out to the poor girl that she is asking of her husband what no human being can ask of anybody. Having been married to three very different men, all of them fine Christian husbands, I have found that no one of them, or even all three of them together if I had been a polyandrist, could “meet all my needs.” The Bible promises me that my God, not my husband, shall supply all my needs.
Writes Paul Tillich, “Man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so they could not be helpers to each other; they could not have human community.”1
Failure in communication, according to a recent poll, is the number one cause of divorce. Recently the exuberant and blunt Oprah Winfrey was questioning people on what went wrong in marriage.
“If I hear that word communication ONE—MORE—TIME—,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then she turned to the “expert” (which usually means anybody who has written a book on anything) and asked what communication means.
“It doesn’t MEAN A THING!” was his answer.
“Thank you,” said Oprah.
So much for that. But one way or another, we must get through to people occasionally, and we all fail in that sometimes, not only with spouses but with others. We don’t take the time to write the letter, make the phone call, visit, sit down and listen. If we are hungry to talk to someone about something we can’t always find anyone who will listen. Some people are gifted communicators, but most of us, gifted or not, could do better. Given the ontological difference which Tillich describes, plus differences in personalities, background, education, language, and interests, communication can never be perfect, but it is not unreasonable to ask for improvement in this area.
Jim, Add, and Lars (my husbands, in that order) have differed in ability, and I have had to learn to be realistic and reasonable in my expectations. Add, who was a very popular speaker and the author of eight books, was, in my opinion, a communicator of the first water. His love letters during our courtship were such masterpieces that I have actually considered publishing them (and thought better of it) as Love Letters of a Theologian. What he thought and felt about me he knew how to put into words. He did not stop doing that when I became his wife, but I found him strangely reticent to speak of many things which profoundly affected his life.
To find someone who “reads” us, responds wholeheartedly to us, and with real understanding, is a rare gift. Many people find themselves married to partners who are on a totally different intellectual or spiritual wavelength, as Ruth Sanford describes in her book, Do You Feel Alone in the Spirit?2 I gather from the number of women who speak to me about this kind of loneliness and isolation that it is a common one.
One gets the impression that most husbands now are caught up in their work at least five days a week, and when they come home want only to “relax,” which does not mean sitting down and talking with wives and children, but turning on the television, picking up the newspaper, or going to the health club. I suppose the same could be said of some working wives. If both work, it is hard to imagine how they will manage even to be friends. Each expects the other to be available when wanted. If the other isn’t, the loneliness that results is hard to take.
A woman whom I’ll call Priscilla told me of an experience of loneliness in marriage unlike any I had heard of. Her husband, who is a professing Christian and seemed in a casual meeting a decent sort, has turned out to be quite uncivilized and quite unchristian. Although they live together as husband and wife (she says he can be wonderfully loving and appreciative), he has in a very strange way abandoned her. He appears to have made a decision before they were married (of which he told her nothing) that she would pay all the bills. When this became apparent after the honeymoon, the only explanation he offered was that she has a good job, she was doing very well before she married him, it doesn’t cost much for him to live in her comfortable condominium and eat at her table—why shouldn’t she foot the bills? Poor woman. Thinking she had married a husband, she finds she has married a nonpaying guest. She’s isolated. She’s shocked, baffled, lonely.
“Why am I in this?” she asked me. It echoes the cry of so many.
We were sitting by the fire in her beautifully decorated living room. We had just finished an excellent dinner which she had cooked. As always, she was elegantly dressed. I was thinking how fortunate her husband is to possess such a woman—pleasant, gentle, sweet-spirited, thoroughly feminine, a real homemaker who also holds a high-paying job. How could he treat her in the ways she described? Of course I know only a fraction of the story, her version. What would his be?
I did not know what to say. The question of what to do with a husband like that I could not answer. I had never been in her shoes, but I had certainly asked the more fundamental question in situations which had nothing to do with marriage: Why am I in this? Sometimes the answer included mistakes of my own, sometimes those of others, sometimes nobody’s.
This is not a book on marital counseling. There is no shortage of those. We are here attempting to face the ultimate questions, such as the one Priscilla asked. There may be many things she can do as time goes by, but before any hint of a change takes place in her situation or her husband, she can go directly to God. He knows why she is in this.
The ultimate answer goes to the Origin of things. Why am I widowed? Why has God allowed a divorce? Why hasn’t He given me a wife (or a husband)? Why do my friends misunderstand me? Why would God give me a husband who doesn’t accept responsibility? Why can’t we communicate? Why did I lose the person who meant most to me in all the world? Why should I, why should anybody be all alone?
Where there are no answers in the present, my mind insists on pushing the questions as far back as possible. Everything that comes up has something to do with God. It is meant to bring me face-to-face with Him and to teach me something about His ways with us. How far back can we push this question of loneliness? Is Priscilla’s or yours or mine the result of circumstances or people we can’t control? Is anybody in control? Are we all adrift in nothingness, or is there someone in charge of the whole scene?
Science is always explaining causes and effects, but to the question of the Original Cause—how did the universe begin?—science gives us strange answers. The explosion theory is one of them. The scientist can tell us exactly why an explosion occurs, whether by choice in a laboratory or by accident in or out of a laboratory. It is the result of the sudden production of great pressure. In other words, it is caused. We can count on that. Something made it happen. Everything, including the universe itself, they tell us, is caused. That’s what science is about. The idea of a Primary Cause, however, is usually ruled out—because, as one scientist stated, “to the scientific mind it is simply intolerable.” Science is content to say that matter produced mind. It refuses to entertain the possibility that Mind produced matter.3
But this original Big Bang—are we to believe that it alone, among all explosions, was not preceded by the sudden production of pressure? Was there no cause at all? Wrong question, we are told. Irrelevant. Unnecessary. It happened. There comes a point where you stop asking about causes. The notion of an Originator is not susceptible to laboratory testing.
Perhaps we can stop with that so long as our thinking is merely theoretical. It’s when things personal occur that the question breaks out most insistently. As Kierkegaard said about Hegelianism, the science of his day: “Hegel explained everything in the universe except what it is to be an individual, to be born, to live, and to die.”4
When I sit on Priscilla’s sofa and look at the pain in her eyes, I am thrown back again to the prior questions. What is it to be an individual, to be born, to live, to die? What does it all mean? Priscilla’s husband is the immediate cause of the pain. She has tried talking to him. She has done her very best to make him see what he is doing to her. She has pleaded with him to be a man. But if she cannot change him (and of course she cannot), is she at his mercy, or is there another Mercy to appeal to?
Dr. Cressy Morrison, president of the New York Academy of Sciences back in the 1930s, once gave a talk on the Law of Chance. If you take ten pennies and mark them with numbers one through ten and put them in your pocket, he said, your chances of pulling out Number One first would, of course, be one in ten. Your chances of pulling out all the pennies in numerical order would be one in ten billion. He then raised the question of what would be the chances of the universe having just “happened,” that life sprang spontaneously from utter lifelessness, that the prodigious intricacies of the human mind originated in mindlessness, that Something came from absolutely Nothing.
The odds against all that would be incalculable, Dr. Morrison said. But he happened to be a Christian. He believed in God.
So does Priscilla, yet she felt as though she were helplessly sinking into an abyss. Had God forgotten to be gracious? Had He in anger shut up His tender mercies?
Why am I in this?
Is it for nothing? Or is it for something?
Months have gone by since that evening by the fire. Friends and family have urged Priscilla to get rid of this man. Divorce is the obvious answer, but it is not an answer she will accept. She has been through one of those and knows she does not want another. Human reason would conclude that a separation at least is the only possible course. Yet—and here is the point—she writes of the presence of God, of a deep heart-desire to learn of Him in the midst of it all, of a determination to fulfill her vows at any cost. Who can say that she is mistaken? Who knows the gains which may come of her daily losses?
Her latest letter, depicting an even worse scenario, ends with:
But the Lord has been so faithful. In agony I have lain prostrate before Him and “wailed.” I had to have chosen the wrong one. He so graciously gave me His word in John 6:70, “Did I not choose the Twelve of you myself? Yet one of you is a devil.” And so He has assured me that even in our finite poor judgment in choosing, I know He has gone before.
Words written to people in trouble many centuries ago by a man who knew a great deal of trouble at firsthand show that there is another level on which the happenings in our lives may be understood:
In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has in store for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God’s purpose it has been so limited—yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!
Romans 8:18–21 Phillips
There is a future and a plan. There is another reality. This is Priscilla’s hope. It is what makes her see things so differently from those who would advise a different course. I cannot say that she is right or wrong, but I am sure God honors an obedient faith. He too walked this lonesome valley. He bore our griefs, carried our sorrows, and died.
It is he who heals the broken in spirit and binds up their wounds, he who numbers the stars one by one and names them one and all. . . . The LORD gives new hearts to the humble and brings evildoers down to the dust. He veils the sky in clouds and prepares rain for the earth; he clothes the hills with grass. . . . He gives cattle their food. . . . His pleasure is in those who fear him, who wait for his true love.
Psalm 147:3–4, 6, 8–9 NEB