manual for marriage, with goals, steps, and techniques, as though it were some kind of machine, betrays the poetic truth of marriage, then the opposite danger of not being concrete enough leads to dreamy, esoteric images of a disembodied ideal that make marriage seem like something best experienced in a trance-like state. God, save us from the champions of the mystical marriage! Marriage is for humans, not angels. We are physical beings, loving our husband or wife in all the commonplace details of day-to-day existence. Marriage, like life itself, is indeed a mystery, but it is inescapably fleshy. It only exists here in this world of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Warning us against the temptation towards escapist, otherworldly spirituality, Scott Cairns writes:
I think that you
forget the very issue which
induced the Christ to take on flesh.
All loves are bodily, require
that the lips part, and press their trace
of secrecy upon the one
beloved— [2]
Marriage takes place with our bodies, which we so often think of as burdens rather than extraordinary, exquisite gifts. But we do not have bodies: we are bodies. Nothing, except perhaps death itself, is a more poignant testimony to the significance of our bodiliness than marriage. The search for the deeper mysteries of marriage is a dangerous distraction if it carries our imagination away from this world and toward some unreal, disembodied ideal. Marriage should draw our attention ever closer to that which is right before us, this lover of flesh and bone, this most intimate other. As the poetic novelist and wise essayist Marilynne Robinson says, “With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”[3] This plunge into the miracle and mystery of marriage is not an escape from this world; it’s a headfirst dive into the deep end of fleshy physicality. And such an intimate encounter with mystery and miracle can never happen by buying some new and novel product, as the advertisers would have us believe. No, there is more to marriage than we will ever comprehend, but we can learn to live in wonder at the wholly human other, the man or woman before us.
Even as I have tried to find clarity as I put my thoughts into words, I’ve done more than just chronicle what has happened in my marriage. In writing, my senses have been awakened, and I have cultivated a deeper sense of wonder at this mystery of marriage—so rich, marvelous, and endlessly surprising, this grace that keeps overflowing from my life with Erika. I write to defend my particular, strong, fragile, and vulnerable love in a world that gives no honor to the kind of faithfulness and commitment that marriage requires. And at the same time I want to share these reflections with anyone who is interested, to encourage them to discover these mysteries for themselves. If I fail to give a faithful account, it is certainly not for having been given too little.
[1]. Capon, “An Offering of Uncles,” 127.
[2]. Cairns, “Loves,” 161–62.
[3]. Robinson, “Psalm Eight,” 243.
1
Brought to My Senses
Sight
Molly is in bed for the night, and Erika is out with friends at her Monday night meeting. My mind is wandering. I’m anxious, though not about anything in particular.
Though we rarely watch TV, tonight I haul it out of the closet and set it up on the shelf in the bedroom. I hook up the old wire antenna and string it around the room to try to get a clear picture. I can usually pick up six channels—four of them are in English—depending on how I hang the antenna and whether or not the people upstairs are using certain kitchen appliances at the time. But I’m hardly “watching” anything here: I don’t stick with any one thing for more than a couple of minutes. I flip from the local news, to a sitcom with an unconvincing laugh-track, to some “reality” show about pop singers, to a crime drama about a new murder this week, and it all starts to blur. I don’t stay on a program long enough to even catch a story line. The advertisements exhaust me: thirty-second rapid-fire comedies or dramas, and watching them reminds me why we keep the TV in the closet. I had imagined that a bit of mindless time with television would be a relaxing treat, but now I’m even more restless than I was an hour ago.
But I keep watching anyway, flipping between channels, hoping I might find something to capture my attention. I can waste hours doing this, watching nothing, gazing at the flashing blue light, gawking at every gadget and gizmo splayed, hawked, and dressed up to look like something I need, and I don’t even understand why I’m watching because I’m conscious of the fact that I am truly wasting my time, and the longer I sit here, the more my mental “To Do” list starts to feel like a bee stinging my conscience—I should do the dishes and I still need to write that film review and I owe Walter a letter and I still haven’t fixed the shelves downstairs and I need to weed the garden and fix the drywall at the neighbors’ place and work on my resume and there’s no doubt I need to start eating better and I need to get more exercise. But I just sit.
Then I hear a key in the lock, the first of a string of familiar sounds, those of Erika coming home: the front door banging shut, folding of an umbrella, click and squeak of closet doors—one for coats, the other for boots—footsteps towards the bedroom. I turn off the TV, awakened not by an image or style, but by a real presence. Her cheeks are red from the cold. She smiles at me. I feel sheepish for wasting the evening, but my wasting time doesn’t bother her. She lays down beside me, puts her arm across my shoulders and rests her head on my chest like she’s listening to my heart. I look at her face. Every so often when I see her face—at a glance before she notices, or examining her closely, as I do now—it almost feels like I am seeing her for the first time. She is still strange to me. I have known her half my life, but when I close my eyes, I can hardly picture her face, as though the longer I know her the more mysterious she becomes.
We undress and climb into bed, and she turns out the light.
Sound
My workday starts when the alarm clock squawks at 5 am. I get up and make some toast, being careful not to set off the smoke alarm. I ride my bike to work on quiet streets, the city just starting to rev up to speed—delivery trucks, a van, transit busses, a few cars with commuters. There’s a siren wailing up the street behind me, but it turns onto a side street.
When I get to work, the music is thumping. Customers show up, order, and wait. I command the big coffee grinder and the hissing espresso machine that seems as big as a little Italian car, and serve up expensive lattes and cappuccinos. A couple hours into my shift, the morning rush arrives, and the banter with the regulars is comfortable and predictable: clichés about work, weather, and politics, gossip from the tabloids, bits of bad news from the day’s newspaper. I holler names and drinks, but it’s hard to be heard over the din of waiting customers and the steady rumble of the coffee roaster in the corner of the room. The satellite radio continuously pipes in a stream of banal songs that all blend together, one into the next. When I started working here, I used to get the songs stuck in my head and they would play on like a jukebox when I was trying to fall asleep at night. Now I hardly notice the music at all. Outside, the cars and busses hiss by on the wet streets.
I’m done by early afternoon. The mid-morning rain has passed and I bike home down the crowded streets: more cars, trucks, vans, busses, sirens, and lots of horns. Vancouver drivers love to use their horns.
When I open the door, I hear Molly shaking a rattle, jangling a bell, and blowing a whistle all at once. “Hi, daddy,” she says. Erika asks me about my day, and I tell her, then ask how the two of them have been. I put on a record, and Molly and I dance together for the first song. I can hear the city workers outside—tractors, dump trucks, jackhammers, cement
