Fifteen years married
When my husband proposed I looked for a sign in the clouds or a voice out of the sky that could tell me what to do. The proposal was what I wanted but I hesitated anyway, and during that pause I felt the Holy Spirit dredging up scenarios I had considered but tried not to worry about.
Our marriage could be wonderful or it could be misshapen by disaster. It could be slowly corroded by circumstances we didn’t choose. One of us could get sick. Our personalities could be reconfigured by events we had no way of predicting. I felt as if the Lord was letting these possibilities flood my mind, like he was assenting to the fact that no marriage is impermeable to suffering.
I felt something else, too: a question from the Lord about what I thought my husband and I were trying to accomplish by getting married.
When I think about what can be accomplished in a human lifetime I usually have to think about the brevity of Christ’s life on earth. Thirty-three years, three of them publicly devoted to a cosmic mission, thirty of them spent in ways that must have seemed unremarkable to his biographers. What was he doing with all that time? Living among his people, I suppose; waking up to a house crowded with parents and brothers, cycling through weekly patterns of work and rest, marking ordinary days and holy days, helping his parents as he grew stronger and as they aged.
I’ve revisited the question I think the Lord was asking me. Since my husband and I married, life has been mostly good, occasionally painful. We enjoy the good moments, and in the painful moments, I think about how much of our life together is outside of my control. There is only one real decision I have at any given time, which is the choice to extend or withdraw myself, to train my attention on the person in front of me or avert my gaze.
Time also clarifies what I think Christ was speaking with his thirty years of apparent silence. The miraculous acts he is known for often have to do with restoring people to one another: turning water into wine so a wedding celebration can continue, cleansing the leper so he can go home. If this is true, then Christ’s submersion in the world around him reads as a slowly choreographed version of the same miracle. He arrives as the Son of God and chooses not to shield himself from the world and everything that could befall him in ordinary life, but to live in communion with the people who have been placed before him as if there is nothing more crucial that he needs to accomplish with those three decades.
What did I think my husband and I were trying to accomplish? What did I think marriage was for? I don’t think the Lord directly refuted the worries that surged forth the moment my husband proposed. They are not groundless. Anything could happen. Yet these worries are inconsequential in light of the miracle Christ has performed and his Holy Spirit causes us to emulate. Christ does not avert reality but he does sacralize it.
Fifteen years is enough time to experience abundant joy and unexpected pain. Fifteen years clarifies what we are trying to accomplish together. I think about what Christ offered with thirty years of ordinary life, as a man sharply aware of the crises around him and his own rapidly elapsing time on earth, still patiently rendering his attention to the people before him. Over the years I have experienced a miraculous quality of attentiveness from David, who has, even with the various burdens he has had to carry, always held me in the focused beam of his affection. I think about how the Lord asked me years ago what marriage was supposed to do, and I think about how Christ himself lived as a miracle of unbroken attention, of steadfast love. I hope David can receive something that approximates this miracle from me.
