Compassion: A 14-Day JourneyMuestra

Stewardship of Spouses
Xerxes is throwing a wildly extravagant dinner party. The only limitation on his guests intake is the boundary of their own desire. At the climax of the revelry, the king sends for his queen, intending to show her off as a status symbol. When Vashti commits the unthinkable by refusing, she subjects this megalomaniac to utter humiliation.
Author Robert Farrar Capon discusses the unrealistically high expectations we place on sex, romance and marriage. (He thinks we tend to make "religions" out of these aspects of our lives. The higher our expectations, the more like a "religion" sex, romance, and marriage become for us.) He also comments on the false expectations we place on these aspects of our lives and on the release valves we look for when the newness wears off. A quotation of his remarks on marriage:

MarriageÉexposes us to all of the unacceptable qualities of our [spouses] and ourselves with relentlessness those other two states [sex and romance] can never match--and because year after year it makes it clearer that what is unacceptable about us is not what we do but who we are--the religions we concoct to conjure with marriage are more useless than any othersÉ

Nevertheless, rather than admit that the religions don't work--that no such canny sacrifices can take the place of patience, manners, and ultimately, forgiveness--we go right on making sacrifices, up to and including the devastating one of immolating each other in divorce. If I had to assign a single, overarching cause to the high American divorce rate, it would be our refusal to throttle, or even to question, the religion of marriage. Our marital breakups are almost always seen by us--after a few token apologies for our own (pardonable) shortcomings--as due to our partner's unpardonable offenses against the god of matrimonyÉ

Capon's conclusion brings home what God intends these relationship stages to mean in the Christian life. His insights are both sobering and profoundly inspiring.

Sex, romance, and marriage then; these three. Like everything else in the world, they are anamneses (remembrances) and prolepses (anticipations) of the Home from which we come and to which we go. But preeminentlyÉthey are the grand sacraments of the fact that Home is the end of a relationship. We are not artifacts destined for an eternal mantelpiece; we are the beloved called the incarnate Wisdom of the Father, into the last relationship of allÉinto the exchanges of the Godhead itself--into the Love of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.