Sherry says that without missing a beat, Richard answered: ‘Her last name!’
I love this photograph of the two of them. You can’t see Shannon’s face but her whole body radiates love for her new husband. And him? The love and tenderness is so plain to see. Such a joyous moment. If one of my daughters were getting married and I saw that look on the face of her new husband, it would be a load off my mind. There could not be a better beginning.
But you know and I know, everybody knows, that it won’t always be like this. However good the beginning is, and however good the marriage is, everything will stand or fall on whether these two young people can hold the light within them steady.
They will have to have the humility to admit when they are wrong, or confused or lack the knowledge, experience or ability to tackle something. They will have to have the forbearance to live graciously with each other’s irritating habits, even when they are tired or unwell. Sitting reading together in the evening, while the other goes sniff… sniff… sniff… the one getting jaw-ache from gritted teeth will have to remember gracious forbearance.
They will each have to have a lowly enough spirit to apologise humbly and honestly when they have gone wrong – been arrogant, spoken out of turn, been selfish or unhelpful or unkind. And that will require self-reflection, and the ability to see oneself through the eyes of another.
They will have to do what the letter to the Romans calls ‘preferring one another’, which is to say treating each other always with respect but, more than that, celebrating the other’s successes and abilities and strengths, rejoicing in those rather than seeking the limelight for oneself. Never competing, always stepping back courteously to allow the other his or her moment of glory.
They will have to hold on some times to St Paul’s advice never to let the sun go down on their wrath – but finish a difficult day with a hug and a kiss; and remember that making love in a marriage is a joy and a privilege but is also in some moments a duty. In my second marriage, when my husband was dying of a terrible illness that stripped away the skin of his mouth and throat, and those mucous membranes were in over-production trying in vain to protect themselves, and he said all he could taste all day was his own flesh rotting, one of the most difficult things to do was kiss him as though I meant it in those weeks before he became too ill to want a lover’s kiss.
They will maybe know – but if not it will help them to learn – that a gentle touch and a little kiss is even more important when a quarrel happens. To withhold tenderness as a form of punishment because of a squabble is not the way of Jesus. There will inevitably be points of friction and disagreement, but there must be no question that the issue is ever the relationship itself. Once they have given themselves, that must be for life. It can never be taken back.
But what if it is taken back? What if, God forbid, twenty years down the road, one of them says, ‘You are no longer my sunshine, my only sunshine – somebody else is now’? What if they have to go through the grinding, wrenching tearing apart of the one-flesh, that divorce is.
Even then, it would be important to hold firmly before their eyes that the way of Jesus is a way of love. When my first husband found a new partner his soul longed to be with, and my first marriage failed, I thought at first that all was lost. I’d lost my lover, my best friend, my life companion. I’d lost the mainstay of our family life – our marriage – and the person who understood me and would be travelling with me into old age. I’d lost the worship leading team that we were, that could make people’s souls sing and call them to worship when they had wandered away and stopped coming. It all broke my heart, of course it did. But then it occurred to me, losing some things, even though they be big things, didn’t automatically mean losing everything. He was still in the world with me. You can go on loving someone, and let the relationship change. He would no longer be my husband, but we have five children together, so he would always be a blood relative, a member of my family. I have no brothers. He could become my brother, or my cousin – and still be my friend. And so he is. I am happy in my present marriage. I no longer miss my first husband – in fact I thank God that things have turned out as they did. I am entirely content. I am glad that the lady for whom he left me has him by her side. Her health has not been good. What a lonely struggle it would have been by herself. God bless them. I know to the centre of my heart that he is still my relative, still my friend. I have no doubt he loves me still – not as a wife and husband love, not as a lover loves, but as an old friend and family member: and in that way I also love him. When there must be a divorce, there is no need to let one’s whole life go to the devil, burrowing like a gnawing worm inside, establishing bitterness, hatred, resentment: at that time most of all it is important to hold the Light high.
I have just finished writing a trilogy of novels (first one will be out in July of next year). In these novels I set myself the task of dealing with some issues that had seriously messed up my heart and heart and life.
In marrying the Badger I stirred up a hornet’s nest of fury in his family. When my first husband married again, I found myself shut out of the gatherings of the family that had been my family for 24 years, and it hurt badly. In my family of origin there were rows and hatreds and spiteful resentments. Standing in the midst of all this, torn from every side by claws and teeth, I could not keep my equilibrium. I needed the whole space of the sky for the indignation that was growing inside me. I could no longer face my work as a Methodist minister, I no longer had anything to say as a preacher. I knew I had to take everything back to ground zero, and sort myself out with God. I left the ministry, and became a kind of recluse while I took up the work of trying to sort out the chaos in my heart. For two years I could not see what to do, but meanwhile I had proposed to my US publisher the idea of a new trilogy of novels and they had said, in principle, yes.
So I wrote my dream of healing and transformation in the novels. I wrote a world in which people have the stamina to forgive and be reconciled, a world in which kindness protects and prevails. I wrote about the struggle and the healing power of learning to see things from the other’s point of view. I wrote a story in which people learn loving respect for each other, and this is what makes things come out right in the end. And I got all that bad stuff out of my system.
And then I hearkened to the insistent call to Plain dress. I obeyed what I had ducked out of before, and accepted the oddness, and took the Plain way. And I found myself clothed and strangely protected. I found that the me that is such a muddle of fears and anxieties and vulnerabilities and terrors was safe inside the Plain dress. Laura Harris posted on Facebook the other day:
Wearing a bonnet doesn't make you a Quaker anymore than whistling makes you a tea kettle. As the chronicler of Quaker fashion history says, "Live up to the bonnet."Plain dress gently espaliers my soul, training me into living up to the witness it announces. Sometimes I manage it, sometimes I don’t. And when I get it wrong, God forgives me.
Something Plain dress has helped me immensely with – and I hadn’t expected this – is the setting of boundaries. Part of the Quaker Truth Testimony (the commitment to a way of integrity) is remaining true to myself and my beliefs even when others don’t like it. It involves treating others with respect but also ensuring that in the territories over which I have dominion within the Peaceable Kingdom (be that the home where I am mother or the classroom where I am teacher or the party where I am host – whatever), people will be required to treat one another with courtesy, respect, understanding and kindness. The Truth Testimony involves the setting of clear and firm boundaries, and even the holy duty (do it with humility and trembling) of admonishing sisters who wear the covering when they overstep the mark and are strident or rude or vulgar or unkind.
Love has many faces, but all of them shine. I am gazing at the face of that young man embracing his bride, up at the top of today’s post here, and rejoicing that his love, like all love, is so moving and so extraordinarily beautiful