Right around this time of November, 60 years ago, my dad became a Christian. My mom met the Lord 3 1/2 years earlier, when she was 12 years old and she was the one who brought him to the Billy Graham crusade where he heard about Christ. I am beginning to collect these stories from them as we move toward their 60th wedding anniversary July 9, 2009.
Mom and Dad's marriage is an example of a traditional marriage, the kind we more conservative people want to defend these days. They are one man and one woman who made a vow to stay together for a lifetime and raise a family that would have both a father and a mother present.
Now there is this huge struggle in our state about whether two men or two women can marry and make some kind of a family together. In the wings there may be even more reconfigurations of marriage waiting to be revealed. Those of us who never imagined marriage could or would be redefined in this way are struggling with what we consider the erosion of an essential institution.
However, as I have been thinking a lot about how the concept of marriage got to be so elastic and twisted, I think it began about 40-50 years ago. It started with the rising acceptance of divorce as a solution to unhappiness in marriage. We didn't know as much as we do today about how to help people make peace with each other. We didn't understand the devastation of various kinds of addictions and dependencies. Divorce was often seen as the only way out and it got easier and easier.
Broken marriages led to children of divorce whose trust had been broken. Those children matured and some of them introduced the idea of having no marriage at all, just choosing to live together "without the benefit of marriage" to see if they were compatible.
That put us on a slippery slope where living together became a matter of convenience and self-gratification with less and less expectation of commitment for the long haul. More and more children were born out of wedlock and the concept of the single parent became acceptable.
Once we accepted singleness in parenthood, it wasn't so strange to see people who had no intention of ever marrying becoming parents. If a single person could be a parent, why shouldn't he or she share a home and children with someone they loved, regardless of marriage? Once we had cobbled together enough homes where children were growing up with non-biologically related adults raising them, we were just a short step from gay couples adopting and raising families. If they could do that, why in the world couldn't they get married and be a "real" family?
And here we are today.
What baffles me is that the straight community, who has systematically eroded the concept of marriage for so many decades is now appalled that gays want to marry. The gays are in the curious position of promoting marriage as a desirable institution to a "straight" society that has increasingly disdained and forsaken it.
I am not in favor of gay marriage, but I am also not in favor of heterosexual marriages that break apart and leave children in the lurch. I am not in favor of heterosexual relationships that are based on narcissistic self-gratification with no intention of commitment for a lifetime. I am not in favor of "easy outs" through divorce, or of parents abandoning their kids because they are not personally happy.
In short I am not in favor of the way this society has watered down and made a joke of marriage generally. Why are we so incensed about gay marriage when we have allowed our country to become a disaster area of failed heterosexual marriages and distressed, confused and abandoned children?
We should have started a long, long time ago defending marriage. We should have protested and voted for marriage when divorce became so prevalent, when adultry became so "normal" and when playing house instead of building a lifetime commitment to one another became acceptable.
When having sex became the reason for getting together, engaging the heart and mind and soul went out the window. When the heart, mind and soul were abandoned we lost our way as human beings. Now we don't seem to have a compass to get us back to sanity.
Christians who understand and believe in the biblical concept of marriage are going to have to stand up with courage in the coming years. The pressure is going to be tremendous! I hope we are ready.
Day and Night
13 years ago
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2 comments:
I believe I hear softly on some strange wind in my heart the faint applause of those who have written on this before. My favorite illustrations of the ins and outs of marriage have been rendered thus far by C.S. Lewis, in his science fiction trilogy, particularly in That Hideous Strength. My great grief currently is that without a strong illustration of how we are all to love each other, how can we go forward rightly at all? More and more I believe absolutely, in every shade, shape, tone, form, and expression, that no relationship can be understood rightly apart from standing up under God's defining Love...if we are left with great examples, but without the Truth present, eternal, and unchanging in How God Loves us in Christ, everything is doomed to decay, even with the best, most noble intentions, and the most carefully weighed logic.
You are right, Stephanie, unless individuals in each generation seek and experience Truth for themselves, the examples of those who lived by the Truth before will become curiosities of the past. By Truth I mean the person and words of Jesus Christ in whom the fullness of God is found. Just this morning I was thanking Him for the long relationship I have had with Him--the living, breathing, saving experience of God's grace found in Christ. In Him are the answers, and in relationship with Him is life!
Colossians 3:3 "For you have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."
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