I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them - it was that promise.When I started writing The Feast at Cana (a contemporary Christian celebration of marriage and family that my music group, SALT, performed several times), I recalled and used this quotation. Originally, I had seen the quote on the front cover of a church bulletin when Fr Harry was at St Henry. He was doing a marriage series. I remembered it, I think, because of the truth it houses. My friend voiced the nearly lyrical passage. In retrospect, that's a great irony. By contrast, I do not think it's ironic that I penned something about marriage. I consider myself something of an expert by way of study, observation, and experience.
At the time we started discussing marrying each other, I was fairly certain it was a good idea. I remember weighing the options.
I was very pragmatic about marrying my husband. I did not marry him because I loved him; for reasons better explicated elsewhere, I am somewhat emotionally withdrawn. I decided to marry him because he loved me and because his family offered something I'd never experienced. I married him because I thought he would be honorable and honest, steadfast and strong, dependable and detached.
See, my parents were very passionate about everything. The passion that flew from person to person in my childhood home was intense and overwhelming for someone extremely sensitive to energy exchange. In my home, one never knew when the extreme would be a happy one or a bad one.
My husband's family was very different. Things were always quiet and people talked to one another with what looked much like respect. They did gently silly things - like making me think they'd let the family dog lick a plate clean and then put it back in the cupboard (I didn't eat there for a very long time!). They included people and seemed interested in the zany topics I had to discuss. I was too naive and trusting to realize then - or for a long time after we married and had a family - that the silence hid secrets, grudges, and hostility.
I wanted the peace I thought I found in my husband's family for my own, so I made my promises. The first time I made them was January 5, 1991. Fr Harry officiated.
We had already indicated our willingness to marry one another with these words:
Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?
Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?
Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his church?
After agreeing to each of these questions designed to ascertain intent, my husband and I conveyed the sacrament of marriage on one another with these words:"(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
"Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
"Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
- See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf"(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
"Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
"Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
- See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf"(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
"Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
"Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
- See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf
I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad. In sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.Tough promises.
Can anyone keep them?
And if they do, are they ever happy?
Over the years I made those same promises to him three more times: once when my wedding ring was replaced and Fr Tim blessed it in the beautiful St Henry chapel. Two other times I made those promises to him during Feast performances. In each case, we were collectively at a different place in our lives and in our marriage, and I meant what I said, and I believed he meant what he said each time. Every time.
Remaking those promises and restating those words was a replay of our wedding day, and it was a renewal and blessing of the sacrament we entered that day.
Those promises should have kept us both safe.
As the events of the dissolution of our marriage unfolded, I spoke to my husband on rare occasions. Once, last January, I told my husband that I would have stayed married. His response?
Actual conversation:
Me: I'm glad you did what you did; I would have stayed married.
My husband: I would have stayed married too, if you had followed the rules.
Me: And what about my friend? What would you have done with her?
My husband: Yeah, well. I'd have her too.
The skin of my teeth.
Escaping by the skin of your teeth means a narrow escape, or barely escaping. It is usually used in regard to a narrow escape from a disaster. The phrase first appears in a translation of Job 19:20, which provides a very literal, word-for-word translation: "I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe." The full passage reads, in modern English: "I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth."
I like this website's additional insight: "Teeth don't have skin, of course, so the writer
may have been alluding to the teeth's [sic] surface or simply to a notional
minute measure - something that might now be referred to, with less
poetic imagery than the biblical version, as 'as small as the hairs on a
gnat's bollock'. (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/83000.html)
Staying in a marriage based on my husband's arbitrary rule structure or staying in it with a third party involved would, for certain, have been living my own life and calling by the skin of my teeth.
Instead, I escaped. And I escaped by the skin of my teeth.
I'm glad I escaped by the skin of my teeth. And I'm glad that real peace, the peace the love of Christ brings, is within reach.
Peace,
Kari
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