Today is the last of the five wedding anniversaries my five children will celebrate in 2022. From January (once) to June (twice) to August (twice), from 20 years to 11 years, these anniversaries mark the beginnings of the families they have formed. My children and their spouses have made their homes places of hospitality. Sometimes it is a hospitality asking, and, costing, "not less than everything." And I, who taught as children three of the wives and two of the husbands in those unions, find that I learn daily from them and their spouses about the hospitality of marriage.
Last Saturday, my husband and I were witness to the wedding of a young woman we have known since she was a baby. We heard again the sober promises of marriage: fidelity in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death; the promise to have a marriage open to children. It occurs to me that all of those promises are about hospitality, the hospitality of welcoming the stranger, the child, that person-who-is-not-you (however much we wish the opposite to be true,) the stranger age and illness and disability can make of a beloved husband or wife. So, weddings are on my mind. And so is the daily life of marriage. And so is what those called to married life, that is, life in community, have to teach and to learn from those called to celibate life in community.
Paul Evdokimov tells this story, "When St. Macarius, the great ascetic, lived in the desert, an angel appeared to him, ordering that he follow him to a remote town. Upon arriving there, he made him enter a poor dwelling where a humble family lived. The angel showed him the wife and mother of this household and told him she had become a saint by living in peace and perfect harmony with all her family, since her marriage, in the midst of daily occupations, keeping a chaste heart, a deep humility, and a burning love for God. And St. Macarius entreated God for the grace to live in the desert as this woman had lived in the world."
I have not lived "in peace and perfect harmony with all my family," (just ask any of them) but I have come to understand how life in the community of marriage can be a pathway to sainthood, how hospitality, the charism of married life, can lead us to Christ. And how we can learn about hospitality and life in community from a celibate monk.
A longer version of the piece below first appeared in National Catholic Reporter.
About the time my cousin discovered what all wives eventually learn, that Prince Charming is an amphibian, that is, half prince-half frog, she went to our grandmother for advice. “Ma-Maw,” she said, “Did you ever think about divorcing Da-Da?”
Ma-Maw said, “Oh, honey, no. I thought about killing him lots of times, but divorce? Never."
When I learned that St. Benedict, abbot and author of the rule, had two (count ‘em, two) monks try to poison him, I figured he was on to something about community life, including the communal life that is marriage.
Benedict grew up in a world in which monks were hermits. They sought God is silence and solitude. Part of Benedict’s genius can be found in his insight that the ordinary act of living together — in community, in stability and fidelity — for one’s whole life, can lead to holiness. Just learning to sit at table every day next to the person whose smacking and slurping drives you mad — while refraining from mad behavior in return — can lead to God. As well it might, because learning to live with another person is hard work. It means forgiving over and over again, long past what seems reasonable and just. It means throwing the assumptions of what constitutes “reasonable and just” out the window, in the same way parents give up wearing “Dry Clean Only” linen while the kids are about and sweat through the summer in washable polyester.
That’s why Benedict’s “little Rule for beginners” is such a handy guide for married life. It’s brief, less than 9,00 words, and plain. It’s not philosophy or even theology; it’s more of a field guide to life in the wilds of community.
Here’s an example: Benedict advises the abbot to know each of his monks individually, and to consider each monk’s needs, talents, shortcomings and strengths. This knowledge is essential for life together. I’ve learned that the night before an appearance in Federal Court is not the time to bring up with my lawyer husband that thing he said at the party last Saturday. Ill timing can turn a misstep into a tumble down three flights of stairs. He’s learned that I can either sleep at night or watch the ten o’clock news with him and worry all night; his choice. It’s hands-on learning, what Dr. Russell Hittinger calls, “knowledge touched by the thing being known.”
Benedict means to lay out a rightly ordered life. He seeks to find a balance between work and prayer, rest and activity, speech and silence. We live in a time when there is no night, and so, no rest. There is always music, piped in elevators and coming out of grocery store ceilings, and so, never silence. We have constant access to emails and Internet and phones, so there is never respite from work. Observe the couple sitting at a table in restaurant, each head bent over a cell phone, thumbs tapping, eyes fixated on the glowing screen. There are messages coming in! But there are no messages going from person to person at the table.
So how do a husband and wife come to know one another as Benedict advises an abbott to know his monks? Benedict advises his monks to “listen to the precepts of your master with the ear of your heart.” Listening with the ear of your heart is not taking notes; it is an attitude, an attitude of two who are in relationship. And it is the cultivation of that relationship — with Christ and with one another — that Benedict teaches.
I’ve been recommending The Rule of St. Benedict to couples planning to marry and those already married, for years. It’s important to take good counsel where it may be found. Married Christians can learn from other Christians who also live in community. “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ,” from Benedict’s Rule, for example, is about the best child-rearing advice I ever received. (Notice he doesn’t say you can’t be worried or afraid or less than thrilled about the guest. You just have to do the work of receiving him or her as you would Christ. There’s nothing about streamers or balloons.)
I said that learning to live with another is hard work. And it is. But the work, difficult though it is, brings joy. And that deserves some focus, too.
I remember the summer after our fifth child was born. We were at the swimming pool and I was watching a woman with a baby about our son’s age. The babies looked a lot alike. The mothers didn’t. In between wishing she would fall in the deep end and drown, I was searching her trim physique for some signs of stretch marks or sagging skin. I figured my husband, married, but not dead, was looking, too. So I said, “She looks pretty good, huh?” And he said, “Oh, I don’t know. She looks a little skinny to me. You know,” and here he leered in the nicest way, “I like a little something I can get my hands into.” I decided right then and there I’d marry him all over again.
Listening with the ear of his heart, indeed. It’s something people who have shared their fears in the middle of the night learn. Waking with a pounding heart at 3 am sure that someone else, a friend, is near. Sometimes I wake him. Sometimes I just listen to his snores and snuffles and take my comfort there. He knows where all the buttons are, sure, but he also knows when not to push them.
It’s the same lifelong sharing that makes me think, whenever I hear a funny story, or an outrageous one, or whenever I learn something new, “I can’t wait to tell Martin about this.”
To all the newly married and long married, Happy Anniversary.
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