Apologize: Marriage
I am off to San Antonio, home sweet home, to be in a dear friend's wedding.
Here's what the Church has to say about her upcoming Big Day-
"For marriage (which is the medicine of incontinency, and continency itself) was instituted by the Lord God himself, who blessed it most bountifully, and wills man and woman to cleave to one another inseperably, and to live together in complete love and concord. Whereupon we know that the apostle said: "Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage be undefiled. And again, "if a girl marries, she does not sin...."
The Second Helvetic Confession
... and on the other hand, a sober note from my friend J:
If someone came to me and explained that I could bet everything on a 50/50 game of chance - where winning would purchase a new house and comfortable living, while losing would leave me broke and destitute, there's no way I would play that game. It simply isn't worth it. Yet this is what people do every day in choosing to get married. Everyone knows the statistics: it's a 50/50 shot they will wind up alone and broken, suffering through some of the worst agony a human can feel. But we are so conditioned against seriously confronting these risks that we naïvely throw ourselves into marriage believing that "it'll never happen to us." But it does. Again and again.
If people were realistic about the enormous risks involved in marriage, there would be many more people following the Apostle Paul in extoling the virtues of unmarried celibacy (see I Corinthians 7 for Paul's take). If we took seriously the dangers, even in light of marriage's benefits (which many concede is a "mixed blessing"), how many of us would play Russian Roulette with a 1 in 2 chance of blowing our brains out?
...Im thinking that both perspectives rather do justice to I Corinthians 7....a most honorable gamble...
posted by MM at 10:35 AM
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