Our week begins with marital verses. The chapters include both narratives and metaphors—from the story of Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage to comparisons of Israel to brides, wherein its relationship becomes as a marriage to God.
In a way, these readings fall into appropriate time. We emerge with them from June, which is, contemporarily, deemed “wedding month.” We are familiar with announcements and celebrations, are weighted down with words of flower arrangements and festivities.
We treat such occasions as epochs, and not unjustly so: two lives winding into one new life warrant a little poetic imagination.
But such occasions also sometimes carry the burden of expectations. Paul and his letter to the Corinthians are often invoked during wedding ceremonies, and so too are other biblical images, some which have a less comfortable inheritance.
Throughout the year, we encounter such verses: insistences that wives be obedient to their husbands. Glorification of wifely quietude.
Even readings like this week’s can prove a danger: in hasty hands, they can be made to suggest power structures which do not perfectly enable marital partnership, but rather set up something archaic, something against which we, in accordance with our values, struggle.
Abraham sends a servant to the land of his ancestors—the land of his fathers, the chapter says—to retrieve from amongst them a suitable wife for his son. And when the servant claps eyes on her, he claims her: he bejewels her, owning her for Isaac by proxy (Genesis 24:37-38, 47).
There exists, here, a residual sense of property exchange: of marriage being more like ownership than partnership.
Our reading from the Psalms might be made to reinforce this: it demands that the “bride”, presumably a metaphor for maiden Israel, “forget your people and your father’s house” in favor of becoming a queen, bejeweled before all the nations (Psalm 45:10). The bride seems to enter a new life herein, one in which what came before ceases to matter; what she becomes as the wife is endowed with the utmost value.
I have been thinking lately about what we expect of marriage. Most women I know balk at outward suggestions of “property” exchange. We are beyond the age of dowries, obviously. Fathers still give daughters away, but the action is now infused more with affection than anything else.
We choose to read from Corinthians at weddings because Paul encourages steadfast love within it; it sounds more like the partnership which we desire than do portions of his other letters which talk about marital submission.
Still, the message is mixed. The portions of Paul which we carefully avoid during June are brought to the attention of married partners when disharmony is reported—we act as though relationships are boats which should never be rocked. The effusive joy of “wedding season” is confused by conflicting attitudes toward marriage throughout the rest of the year.
We still do not make it easy for Christian women to confess marital unhappiness, even when their safety is at stake. We remain wary of divorce. We are dogged about the term “forever”, even in the face of distress. Discord exists between what we expect of marriage, and what we insist that individual people are entitled to, in terms of respect, in general.
This confusion only deepens if we allow ourselves to get moored in the culture of the scriptures, acting as though it ought to always be reified in our own time. Stories such as Rebekah’s retrieval, on Isaac’s behalf, as well as portions of Paul, can muddle our ideas about relationships, though they ultimately need not to.
What was expected of Abraham in ancient Mesopotamia does not exactly correspond to our own situations; Rebekah and Isaac don’t have a love story which necessarily begins as ours do. Nor do the relationships of Paul’s churches perfectly correspond to our own: Rome had its own mores, its own expectations.
And yet there are portions of all of these books with which we can identify. Rebekah might not enter Genesis perfectly—there is an underlying sense that she is more like her father’s “property” than she is an autonomous being, worthy, owing to her own human merit, of love and respect. Yet this subset of the tale runs out of steam quickly.
Rebekah is brought to Isaac—a prize to her triumphant. But the triumphant groom does not lord over her. Instead, our reading ends with this: “she became his wife; and he loved her” (Genesis 24:67).
The hope is in the conclusion, in the assurance that he loves her. Rebekah becomes a comfort to him. Their relationship becomes a mutual exchange. She becomes, in the words of Song of Solomon, beloved: someone upon whom he depends, as much as she depends upon him.
The scriptures are insistent about the nature of love, and none of their ideals focus upon power. It is selfless self-giving—loving another as we would wish to be loved. It has been articulated as self-emptying, of the abandonment of personal impulses in deference to another. It is an exchange. It is symbiotic.
How much better our world could be if we talked of marriage this way, and not just of the wedding. That too many expectations still arise from the uglier side is attested to by incidents of domestic violence, and by silence surrounding such difficult topics in “polite” Christian society. We recite Corinthians at the wedding—and then we fall silent.
We bemoan “mistakes” when they happen, but often too late, prompted by tragedy, impervious to daily necessity.
I’ve been thinking about relationships lately, worried by the ways in which they go wrong. I lost a beautiful friend, a bright Christian woman, this summer to domestic violence. She was fortunate enough to have supportive family, and a supportive church community, at her back as she combated her difficult situation, though ultimately this proved not enough.
I’ve been thinking about how I’ll speak of relationships now, having seen the worst end to one in which the woman wasn’t afforded her due respect. Too late, I crave the images of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for my friend: never jealous, never petty, always kind. I crave them for all brave enough to forge marital relationships.
We don’t make much use of terms like property exchange during the “wedding season”; we pretend as though we’ve gotten beyond such things. Yet it seems that not enough respect is given between husbands and wives after the wedding lights dim. We forget to parlay the ceremony’s readings into our lives.
“And he loved her,” Genesis says. Such a quiet, simple statement; so succinct after the rambling story of how Isaac “met” Rebekah. And yet all of the work of a marriage lies therein—indeed, all of the work of any Christian, any believer.
He loved her.
I wish the hope, the confusion, the hard work and the joy of that line upon the marriages which began, are beginning, are midstream, are aging and are anticipated right now. The best lessons of our Bible are incumbent on such love. We are to struggle toward it, and to renew it continually once we’ve attained some measure of it.
He loved her; that remains the example which we’ll be better for trying to emulate. It stands at the heart of our faith.
1 comment:
Jan:
I was very frustrated with myself when I realized that I'd written last week's blog in the wake of the historic New York decision, and had still fallen into the trap of discussing marriage in a gendered, limited way.
I hope this week's blog does a little to atone for the holes in last week's.
Cheers,
M.
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