Musings on Marraige
I am in a Pastoral Counseling class for seminary right now and I have to do a project that puts together a "pre-marital counseling" presentation. The thing is, the concept of marriage has been on one of my back burners for a long time now as a topic where the status quo just doesn't set right with me. Now that it is being forced to the forefront of my brain for this class I am putting a lot of time into pondering what exactly doesn't set well. Here are some of my thoughts so far:
In our culture is seems Marriage is a process, not an event. There are many things that play a part in people becoming married. Shared life, shared economics, shared bodies, shared commitment, covenant (a deeper level of shared commitment?), legal contracts, communal acknowledgment/celebration. Any one of these alone is not a marriage. But the more of these you add into a relationship, the more married the couple becomes.
People coming to a pastor to "get married" may already be married in every aspect save one. Others may be barely married at all. For some the marriage process is very quick, and others it takes much longer. It also seems to be the cultural norm to not complete this process (what ever that may mean) until a couple is in their late twenties and early thirties. Furthermore, many who have gone through divorce tend to opt out of some of these parts (most often ceremonies and the legal contract... especially since the legal contract happens automatically to some degree once a couple has been co-habitating for more than 7 years) when entering into a new "marriage relationship". You can pick and choose which pieces suit your relationship best. This is just how it is.... it is the cultural norm.
But at what point does a couple move from becoming married to actually married? And does it matter in what order it all happens? Or if something I listed is missing? Or how fast or slow it all comes together? So what is the job of the pastor? What is the purpose of pre-marriage counseling (if there is such a thing if marriage is process rather than an event)?
As to the first question, I think the larger culture would say it is the legal contract that makes it official... but that answer seems to confuse the church. And for good reason.
Maybe it is not so much about the order in which people intertwine themselves but that all the vital pieces eventually get added int the mix to make the marriage healthy and whole.
Perhaps it is the pastors job to call people deeper into the reality of marriage that God intended for us, as a reflection of the trinity (perfect love in community), and a sacrament of Grace and Love.... even in our brokenness and failure.
I also am thinking that this will be a messy issue for the church to deal with as culture slowly continues to remove itself from Christendom. Once again the church is needing to let go of more power... power to forbid people from behaving a certain way (and having it socially backed up), power to deem who is married and who is not (and having it legally backed up), power to say how people should order their relationships.... and the list goes on. Its messy and complicated and anything but obvious.
But there is one thing that does seems obvious to me: Deciples of Jesus (Christians) will need to wrestle with what intimacy, promise, commitment, covenant and marriage actually mean and what it looks like on an every day level. Marriage betwene Christians may be radically counter cultural... which will then require that we figure out how to be that way without judgeing and condemning others. It may end up that the larger cultural norm is not necissarily unbiblical (read: evil *snicker*) and therefor we just have to let go of some old ways of thinking that are more cultural than they are actually christian. I don't know, maybe its a little of both.