Chapter 28: Dynamic, Not Static
DYNAMIC, NOT STATIC
WE’VE talked about who it is you’re marrying. Now what is marriage? You’ve had Barth’s definition. I can’t improve on that, but there are four things which, as you live out the days and weeks and years with your husband, marriage turns out to be.
It is a dynamic, not a static, relationship. It gets either better or worse. As people either grow or deteriorate, relationships between them must grow or deteriorate. A common explanation offered for marital incompatibility is “We outgrew each other.” A couple meets in high school or college, shares youthful interests, marries, begins to find out that “making it” in the world may not be as much of a lark as making friends, making grades, or making touchdowns was, back on campus. Responsibility begins to close in and bills have to be paid, decisions made, hard work done for which there are no public (and all too often not private) rewards. It’s been said that if a couple doesn’t grow together they grow apart. But for the couples who have in all seriousness said their vows before God and in the presence of witnesses the possibility of growing apart need not be allowed. It need never be something which “happens to” them, as though they were bystanders injured by some force which they were powerless to protect themselves from. They have willed to love and live together. They stand, not helpless, but in relation to God, each responsible to fulfill his vows to the other. Each determines to do the will of God so that together they move toward “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” And, if God is viewed as the apex of a triangle of which they are the two base points, movement toward Him necessarily decreases the distance between them. Drawing near to God means drawing nearer to each other, and this means growth and change. They are being changed into the same image from glory to glory. There is no such thing as stagnation, or that relatively innocent-sounding word incompatibility.
There are tensions. The strength of a great cathedral lies in the thrust and counterthrust of its buttresses and arches. Each has its own function and each its peculiar strength. This is the way I see the dynamics of a good marriage. It is not strength pitted against weakness. It is two kinds of strength, each meant to fortify the other in special ways. We have already talked about the sailboat analogy with reference to the meaning of discipline. It is not a weakness for the boat to submit itself to the rules of sailing. That submission is her strength. It is the rules that enable the boat to utilize her full strength, to harness the wind and thus take to herself the wind’s strength. It was not weakness in the Son of God that made Him obey the will of the Father. It was power —the power of His own will to will the Father’s will.
There is in a good marriage both dependence and independence on both sides. Your husband needs you to be different from him, to be what you are alone, to be what he can never be and what he needs and wants. Only in this way can you be what you are in relation to him. Only in this way can you complement him. He depends on you to be his complement, you depend on him to be yours. He is independent of you in his differences —you are woman, distinct, wholly other, opposite. “Nevertheless,” said the apostle Paul, “in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.” Men and women cannot and must not try to live life without reference to the opposite sex. They are interdependent and are meant to acknowledge and confront one another. It is this confrontation —most clearly realized in marriage —that makes it of enormous importance that the sexes not be confused, ignored, played down or played off against each other. We need each other. A husband and wife need to be husband and wife, not buddies. The dynamics must be maintained as the Architect intended.
You have already had some experience of this process of change. You met Walt first because he was Ed’s friend. When you saw him next, when you came home from college for the holidays, he interested you and you began to think of him no longer as the friend of a friend, but as your friend. Remember the evening when you were casually going about your business, cleaning up the kitchen, doing your ironing, and he stayed and stayed? You saw that he was making excuses to stay, and the realization that you interested him caused another change. He was not merely a friend anymore. Two months later you had a valentine from him, and soon after that a birthday card. At Easter you saw him again and began to wonder if you loved him. You got one or two letters during the summer, and in the fall you knew without a doubt that he loved you. Then, last Christmas, he was your fiancé, and will soon be your husband.
Friend, lover, husband. In your life together he will be many things to you. Confidant, companion, provider, strength, playmate, listener, teacher, pupil, leader, comforter, and, as Sarah saw Abraham, “lord.” Each role has its glories and its limitations, each requires a different kind of response from you and this takes resilience, adaptability, maturity. Life is made exciting and interest is sustained by these dynamics so long as all are undergirded by love.
Your provider may someday lose his job. Your strength may show unexpected weakness. Your knight in armor may experience a public defeat. Your teacher may make a serious mistake that you tried to warn him about. Your lover may become a helpless patient, sick, sore, and sad, needing your presence and care every minute of the day and night. “This isn’t the man I married,” you will say, and it will be true. But you married him for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, and those tremendous promises took into account the possibility of radical change. That was why promises were necessary.
There are things in life which can make what seems to be a mockery out of the solemn promises. “To love, honor, and obey” your husband can seem the last ironies in the face of the unspeakable humiliations and indignities of illness. Love, honor, and obey this beaten, anguished, angry man who will not take his pill? The vows are serious. Staggeringly serious. But you did not take them trusting in your own strength to perform. The grace that enabled you to take those vows will be there to draw on when the performance of them seems impossible.