Theology Thursdays- married and buried

"Because I realize that no one will ever love me like God loves me."
Those words, spoken by a young lady I know and love when asked why she was considering a vocation to religious life, and relayed to me by her amazed and grateful mother across a plate of Colombian-made quesadillas,  forever solidified in my mind the decision to trust God that my marriage was the best thing He had planned for me.

You see, my marriage hasn't been easy. And while I'm not going to reveal all the ways and reasons why that is, suffice to say that I have known a deep suffering, sometimes even regret, over my choice to marry. At the same time, I have known an inner joy that was more than just happiness or contentment... I've experienced true, real, and lasting peace in my marriage, and that's something I don't think many people can say.
The most important thing I've learned from all this married life can be summed up in one sentence:
Marriage isn't really about me. It's a gift to the world, because no one will ever love me, like God loves me.

When I was younger, I had many boyfriends. Girlfriends, too. Relationships came and went like the tide on the beach where I lived, and the only real reason--if I'm honest-- that I pursued them as much and as hard as I did was that I was lonely. I wanted someone to love me unconditionally, to think I was interesting, pretty, funny, or smart.
Because I was raped and abused as a child I also got an inordinate amount of my sense of identity from my sexuality, which meant that in those confusing days, I simultaneously wanted to be sexy, desirable, and objectified, and left alone, respected--even cherished.
But that wasn't what happened. It never is.

Intentionally or not, I exuded the promises of sex and sensuality, so people wanted to have sex with me, and it was never long in my peer groups and around town before I was known as a slut, even though I didn't have sex anywhere NEAR as much as people assumed that I did.

It probably didn't help that I was raised between America and France, and as such had learned a certain art of seduction that American girls are sometimes poorly educated in-- the ability to make promises with my eyes, for example, or to know just how to make one's desires... and purposes... known without saying a word. Americans often romanticize the French ability to seduce, but truth be told the French use it not so much for sexual purposes as Americans would like to think. Rather, it's a part of the general French concept that one should make even the most mundane experiences as pleasurable as possible. Whatever the reason, I incited thoughts about sex and sexuality far more than I ever should have or WOULD have had  I actually had the foresight to know what I was doing.

The awkward situations multiplied before my eyes-- the man who kept hanging around our sliding glass door and watching my roommates and I sleep, the man who groped me as I passed him on a freeway overpass on my way home from the bars, the woman who molested me in the blacklight room in the back of a head shop, the man who followed me home from a rave, the man who groped me on the metro... these were just a few of the people who caused me pain in those years by having absolutely no concern for my human dignity.
Then there are the people I objectified...the man who I seduced, slept with, and then hurt by not wanting to be in a relationship with the next day when he was excited about it. The women in the pornography industry whom I worked with. The man who loved me and whose love and care I mocked by cheating.

Then I got married, and those relationships and situations became like a distant fog that I was sure would never wrap its way around me.Eventually, they did, of course. Every single one has had an impact on my marriage in some way. But at the time, I was sure.... I was safe. It was my time.

When I got married, I wasn't thinking about objectification, sanctification, or anything else. I was thinking about me: dreams of always having someone to rub noses with when the first rays of the sun hit the blinds... of shared meals and holidays, of soft kisses and bottles of red wine emptied over discussions about dreams and The Future.

Dreams gave way to reality, and it became increasingly difficult for me to understand why people got married in the first place. It wasn't that I didn't "love" my husband....I did, and most of my problems stemmed from the fact that I couldn't understand how someone who loved me could be so inconsiderate and unkind. (Of course, at the time, I was both things to him as well.)

 I knew all of the solutions people had for building up a bad marriage-- working on trust, and communication, and compassion. And I just wasn't seeing it in my own marriage... the only thing I saw was injustice, and it was too much to go on.

Around that time I found a book called "Created to be his helpmeet" by Debi Pearl. In it, I read a different message than the one I heard everywhere else.... a message that in my blind selfishness I had never before considered. That message? That it didn't really MATTER if I had been given a good or a bad husband. What mattered was that I was responsible for my own actions, my own responses, my own soul, my own situation. And for every action I took.

As a protestant, this message resonated with me very strongly. It stuck with me as a Catholic, and was especially interesting to ponder when I considered the lives of the married saints, many of whom had had extremely difficult marriages to husbands far, FAR worse than my own. Over time I made this message the central point of my life, and it helped me to heal so many other wounded relationships because the relational points were the same:
Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter if he's wrong if you aren't right. We love others because God first loved us. And no one will ever love me like he does.

It's not an easy message. It's even harder to hear through the din of voices that clamor: "you have that right!" and "don't you deserve to be happy?" and "I could never do that. I don't know how you do!"

I've thought about it often. I've seen first-hand how arranged marriages can turn into completely amazing, fulfilling love-fests complete with fruitful, large families and joy, joy, joy. I've also seen how families who have everything going for them "physically" (good health, good looks, good finances, good experiences) can have nothing going for them spiritually... just emptiness and sadness, behind the pretty, shiny surface.

What makes it work? What makes one marriage stick and another dissolve?

Over time, I've often wondered if it "would have worked out" with someone else... in another situation, with another person, one of the people I mentioned before, for example.
I've asked myself... if we only had more money, if we had different jobs, if we had less kids, or more. If we lived in a different city, or if we were different people. Every time, I come to the same conclusion--that there would still be issues, imperfections, moments that don't work. There would still be stuff that got in the way between me and my happiness. And if I was single? The same struggles, the same distress. There is truly no right answer, only the path that God has laid before each individual person, with struggles tailor-made to fit that person.

I came to realize that marriage was a saint factory. That for every person who had ever sinned against me and for every person who I had ever sinned against, there was healing to be found in the messy, sweet, stretching-towards-perfect union of two people who commit to daily walking towards a common goal and common life, regardless of where their heart might be at any given moment and regardless of what treasures or nightmares they are storing up in their souls at any given time.

My marriage would never be perfect... it would never even be "good," until I realized that it isn't my husband who loved me first, it was God.

My marriage needed something, but it wasn't family dinners and better communication, retreats or counsel from older couples. What it needed was sacrifice-- a spirit of salvific suffering, united to Christ. What it needed was the rooting out of those fleshly tendencies that keep us all enslaved to feelings, facts, and falls. What it needed was FAITH.

When I was in France this past summer, I came under a really powerful, really direct spiritual attack that nearly took me out. In essence, it was as if Satan was showing me all the kingdoms of the world and saying to me: you can have all this--- all these pleasures, all this fun, all this STUFF in the world... if you but bow down and worship me. My Lord and Savior, when he was in the same situation said:
"Get away, Satan! It is written: 'The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.'" (referencing Deuteronomy 10:20)

Me? I said YES...yes to the Liar and Enemy of my soul.....  yes to the enemy I have fought all my life.... Yes and more yes....yes until I came home and saw my husband-- who by the time I came home had become in my mind the cause of all my suffering and the reason behind my misery. 

I returned ready to pack up, move out, take my kids, enroll them in school, get on birth control, and get the Barbie show on the road. I was ready to throw in the towel and become a statistic... and all I could think of was FREEDOM! I wanted out.

It wasn't the first time we had considered divorce--- my husband and I are notorious in our circle because our priests are constantly blessing new wedding rings for us after we fling the old ones at each other and lose them. It's been a rocky road. On the other hand, I was ready to trash every inch of progress we had fought and prayed for for seven long years. Yes, it was true that we had come to love each other very much, despite our differences. But none of that mattered anymore....

After all... "I have that right!" and "don't I deserve to be happy?" and "You could never do that. You don't know how I put up with it!"

But do you know what happened?

One morning, I got a letter from my wonderful aunt, a secular humanist who runs a nonprofit and dedicates her entire life to helping women leave situations of slavery. While I love and admire and appreciate her dearly, it is worth noting that she is in no way what I would consider a practicing Christian. 

Her letter began: "My dear, I woke up this morning and felt I should write to you about freedom. It is an issue I have thought about for many long years. And what I have realized is this: My freedom ends where another's begins..."

I don't know why it hit me as hard as it did. I knew that God was talking to me, and I determined to listen. For the next several days, it seemed that was all he did. And when He was done, He made me a proposal.

Listen my daughter, He said to me. No one -- no one-- has freedom for the sake of freedom. You have freedom so that you can use it to do good. And what good will you do when you have refused to love and serve the very one whom you have promised Me to help? What good will it do when I ask you: Did you keep your promises? Did you love others, even the most difficult to love? Did you serve those I placed in your path? Were you an instrument of my Peace and a sower of my Word? I gave you freedom so that others might taste the freedom you have in me. Find it in ME. You can not give away what you do not have yourself.

Broken, I went to my husband and told him everything. And -- amazing as he is-- he took on the challenge, pain I caused him and all. This was all over a month ago, and it's still fresh in my mind. The results were immediate; already there is something healing about someone who should be running OUT running in with a determined grin. We are wowed with the courage of firefighters when they do that. Amazingly enough, my husband is now a firefighter, a daily reminder that death is right around the corner for all of us and that the bravest among us run IN to take care of others when everyone else is going out.

You see, we are called to die for others, in imitation of the One who died for us. Only if that grain of wheat DIES and falls to the ground, can it bring forth bread that nourishes.
When I was younger, I tried to kill myself while intending to live. Now that I'm older and wiser... I am intentionally living a life that aims to die.

And here I sit, writing you a blog when I should be sleeping, just so you know that I'm holding fast to those wedding vows. Why? "Because I realize that no one will ever love me like God loves me."

It may be what that young lady's vocation to religious life is all about..... but amazingly enough, it's also what my marriage is all about. And yours.