Copyright © 2012
by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use
in public gatherings with attribution of author and blog site.
At dinner with a
close friend during a time when I was writing a book on same-gender marriage, I
was stunned by his blunt rebuke to my musings about the spiritual dimensions of
marriage.
“There’s nothing
sacred about marriage,” he said matter-of-factly.
Now, granted, I
wrote in my book that author Jonathan Rauch said at a book-signing that he
believed the one thing that most prompted resistance to marriage equality was
people’s association of marriage with something sacred, even if they weren’t
religious. And thus I spent pages in my book deconstructing the notion of marriage’s
association with the sacred, which makes the rethinking of marriage a deeply
held taboo. Variants on what is held up as “traditional marriage” are thus
suspect to the dominant culture, especially those of same-gender love, yet
another taboo.
But I had come to
the conclusion that marriage is, in fact, a spiritual discipline attempting “to
give a future to a present love,” in the words of Christian ethicist Margaret
Farley. Just like joining a spiritual community, cultivating a prayer life,
developing an ethic of justice and mercy, or following a vocation, committing
oneself to marriage is a means to grow spiritually. In the book I quoted a romantic “chick flick”
in which the protagonist, a woman, says regarding her relationship, “It’s not
so much about monogamy. It’s about focus.” Spiritual disciplines are about
focus, or, to use the Buddhist term, mindfulness.
As I reflected
afterwards on my friend’s words, it occurred to me that their ability to jar me
came from my very different view of the world. I see everything as sacred, or
having sacred potential. As Henri Nouwen wrote in Creative Ministry, “The whole
of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself.” The mystic
Meister Eckhart said that even a caterpillar is so full of God a sermon would
prove unnecessary!
That’s why I so
readily see the sacred or sacred potential in the marriage of same-gender
couples as well as opposite-gender couples, and why I fail to comprehend those
whose vision of the holy fails them when it comes to same-sex marriage.
Martin Luther
called marriage a “divine and holy estate of life” and “church of God” that was
to take in and care for strangers much as monasteries and cloisters did. John
Calvin claimed marriage as a vocation equal to all religious vocations,
containing a holiness closer to the reign of God than a cloister. Anglicans
held that marriage was a little church that served as a “seminary of the Church
and Commonwealth.”
I concluded in my
book, As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage, that “we might best
view marriage as a little monastery, a contemplative order of the partners in
marriage themselves, who have reined in conflicting desires in order to focus
on one another (and their children, if so blessed) to love and honor and in
some sense obey, obey as in mutually trusting one another’s spiritual
leadership.”
Such definition
does not exclude Luther’s understanding of marriage as providing hospitality to
strangers, Calvin’s understanding of it as a calling, nor the Anglican
understanding of it as a church and seminary where worship and education occur.
Nor does it
exclude same-sex couples.
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Chris is
available to give presentations and workshops on marriage in the Bible and
Christian tradition as it relates to same-sex marriage. For more information,
click here.
Tax-deductible
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