Fragile Ties and Uncertain Loyalties

Recently I was flying from Dallas-Fort Worth to Los Angeles after a day of non-stop talking in interviews, to a group, to individuals, and I sank into my seat, placed my briefcase in front of me and stuck my feet up on the wall, prepared to have a three-hour period of silence to regain my strength for what was ahead. However my search for my misplaced boarding pass, and the sudden scooping up into her arms of a tiny dog (who had made a tiny puddle on the floor in front of us) on the part of my neighbor in the next seat, brought several “excuse me pleases” along with smiles that made contact of two human beings immediate. After the puddle had been mopped up, the beautiful girl sitting next to me glanced at the book sticking out of my briefcase (What Is a Family?) and asked, “Did you know that 75 per cent of marriages end in divorce? How can I stay married?” Then in a rush she went on to add, “My job takes me away three weeks at a time. He doesn’t mind that.… but we don’t have time to get to know each other very well.” To help me understand her problem better she gave me another piece of the puzzle by adding another factor, “You see I am the only woman who has attained the position I have in my field, and I am afraid I would be letting the girls down if I stopped.”

I was being presented with the very opposite dilemma from the one that current attitudes so forced on women, that of needing a career to get away from drudgery, and of needing outside contacts to get away from boredom of being too much with one person. Here was a cry of someone lost in a wilderness trying to find some path or hiking signs to get to a desired destination. The yearning was to find a way to strengthen fragile ties of a very new relationship, and to sort out loyalties that were spread so thin as to have no certainty as to what should come first. Lost in a maze of twisted ideas and off-key voices is the basic understanding of what marriage is all about. The empty place beside Adam as he walked and worked in the garden was also a vacuum in any possibility of horizontal communication, to say nothing of physical contact. When God made Eve that Adam would no longer be alone, he gave both man and woman a oneness that was triple—physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

The explanation God gives of marriage is that of leaving something good in order to have in the area of both time and space the possible reality of “cleaving” or “clinging” together, and of being one physically as well as of making and sharing a shelter. The leaving of father and mother is what is given by God to man as he is told that he is to be joined to his wife. The necessity of making place for a new and central loyalty, and taking time in togetherness to strengthen new ties is clearly set forth. As we are finite creatures, choice is always involved of courageously putting something aside to do the thing that we are convinced is of central importance. If “togetherness” and “oneness” are to be a growing lasting thing, then two finite human beings need to have time and be in the same place as much as possible in order to communicate verbally, physically, and in sharing a variety of creativity and even drudgery together. “Love suffereth long and is kind” demands proximity sufficiently long to portray patience and kindness in the midst of immediate difficulties, not distant ones.

The three-hour conversation that followed started not with the subject of marriage, but of the base upon which life itself must be built. If there is no base, no ground, no foundation, the structure of life itself is a flimsy uncertain shifting kind of thing, easily demolished by the storms and high winds of voices that cannot be judged because there is no unchanging position by which to judge them. Instead of paths being marked, there is a constant taking away of the markers, a planting of scruffy shrubs and weeds on all the paths, blotting out any sense of direction. Three hours is too short to cover philosophy, history, science in a rush of words, or to outline something of the content of the unchangeable answers from the Bible. However, there is no way of plunging in with meaningless words to talk about the centrality of the career of marriage in the lives of married people, without giving some map of the wilderness of ideas and trying to show where the plainly marked paths were, and still are when the camouflage is removed.

No wonder people are bewildered like wandering babes in the woods when the reality of the existence of diversity between male and female is attacked so fiercely, and then sex is lauded as something that has the basic purpose of “oneness” totally erased from any consideration. A recent article sent to us stated dogmatically that “sex” is no longer to have any romantic meaning at all, but will become a form of “recreation” to take its place among other recreations. The ideas put forth as to not only what marriage is, but who human beings are, are so thoroughly “wandering stars” or “clouds without water” that the fear that clutches people as they are cut off from continuity of human relationships is a dark fear indeed, because there is no sign of continuity from any source in the universe.

In contrast we who are Christians are meant to be giving a demonstration of what the possibilities are of strengthening human ties, and of continuing to place value on human loyalties. The basic relationship where this is to be made a lifelong career is meant to be marriage. However, for married and unmarried Christians alike, the picture of a “clinging together” man and wife is meant to be only a small illustration of the wonder of our really completely lasting relationship with the Bridegroom, Christ. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31,32).

We, men and women, married and unmarried, are to recognize that our Bridegroom is infinite, and that therefore his promise, “I shall never leave thee nor forsake thee,” is able to be literally kept. He can be alone with each of us at the same time; he has no choices to make because the whole church, the body of believers, is his bride, yet he does not have to choose to be with us only “enmasse” but individually he is here, and wherever we go, he goes with us. Our moment by moment communication depends not upon his staying with us, but upon our calling upon him, feeding upon his Word, reading his communication, talking to him in prayer and in song, spending sufficient time as a bride really putting the Bridegroom first in loyalty, love, and desire. May we uncover the path to strengthening our own “ties,” both the human ones and with our unchanging Bridegroom.

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