Seth Carrier Ministerial Student

First Church and Parish in Dedham

March 14, 2010

 

First, let me assure you that there isn’t a mistake in the order of service. As someone who has never been married, I am indeed up here about to deliver a sermon on marriage. Fortunately, the plan is not for me to give you my decidedly in-expert advice on how to be married. If by some miracle I did have all the answers, I’d have written a book and would be independently wealthy by now, and I probably wouldn’t be here with you this morning. I am taking a class on Pastoral Care and Couples this semester, though, which has gotten me particularly interested in the topic of marriage, in addition to providing me some excellent source material.

 

I thus want today to have us specifically consider the history of the institution of marriage and explore how it has changed dramatically over the centuries, contrary to the idealized image of marriage that popular culture often holds up today. And then I want to talk about where we, as people rooted in this time of continued re-definition of marriage, can make a difference.

 

A very wise sage once said, “Old ways of doing things no longer work perfectly, new ways have not yet been developed, and there are times we are caught in the crossfire of interconnecting misfiring systems.” If you were here last Sunday, you got to hear Rali share those words with us in her sermon. “Old ways of doing things no longer work perfectly, new ways have not yet been developed, and there are times we are caught in the crossfire of interconnecting misfiring systems.”

 

Rali proceeded to reference many troubled societal systems and institutions such as our current health care system; marriage is not spared in facing similar challenges. The divorce rate continues to hover around forty percent. The number of couples who choose to forego marriage altogether is on the rise. These same unmarried couples often choose to raise children together. And the issue of same-sex marriage continues to be a lightening rod in the political arena. There is no value judgment assigned to any of the proceeding statements. Rather, they are facts that reflect the waters swirling around the institution of marriage.

 

So, are the waters really as troubled as they seem to be? Part of the struggle may be our perceptions of marriage, and how we tend to idealize what it means to be married. The “perfect marriage” of the ‘50’s and 60’s is an example of this idealization. People often yearn for the “better and simpler times” of the “Leave it Beaver” world of the Cleaver family, without realizing that that era was not fixed, but instead just one in a long line of transitional periods. Others hold up the Bible as a reference for traditional marriage despite the realities of what marriage meant back in Biblical times, as we saw in our second reading today. Yet another group thinks that the passionate throes of love that mark the beginnings of most relationships will run for the entire course of the marriage, which in reality is most often not the case.

 

The media does not help in all of these situations, portraying ideals that simply do not match up with the world we live in. Take music as but one example. How many different songs from all different musical genres emphasize the passion and excitement of soul-wrenching love? It makes sense of course, who wants to listen to a song about the hard work of living together on a daily basis, or about the struggles we all have to communicate better? I can’t imagine a song called “Let me hug you in your flannel pajamas while I ignore the cold sore on your nose” would make it into the top ten.

 

All of these perceptions and ideals that don’t match reality can cause us to set some pretty high expectations. As is often the case when there are high expectations, people end up disappointed.

 

Let us take a step back farther in time, though, than the 1950’s and 60’s. Stephanie Coontz, author of our first reading today, researched the history of marriage and came to the conclusion quite quickly that love-based marriage is a recent invention. This can be quite a surprise to our modern eyes and ears, as love-based marriage has been the norm during both our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes. The reality is that love-based marriage is an innovation of the past hundred and fifty years located specifically in Western Europe and North America, and it is still not the norm in many cultures around the world.

 

Prior to the evolution of love-based marriage, the institution of marriage was about politics and economics. In Marriage, a History, Coontz starts with pre-historic societies, and steps us through the marriage practices of the major empires and cultures of the world over time. The verdict? Prior to the recent evolution of love-based marriages, the institution of marriage has instead been used historically in two primary ways. First, it has been used for political means, to help form alliances and consolidate power. Second, it has been used for economic purposes, to expand earning power and to ensure proper inheritance of wealth.

 

This historical concept of marriage was not limited to the upper classes either. In fact, “the concerns of commoners were more immediate… farms or businesses could rarely be run by just a single person, so a prospective partner’s skills, resources, and tools were at least as important as personality and attractiveness… Most [commoners] had a two-person, married-couple career that neither could conduct alone.”

 

The changing economic structures of the modern age have allowed this transition into love-based marriages, and more recently, the transition into the single-earner, male-breadwinner role model from the 50’s and 60’s. This most recent evolution would not even have been possible without the new economic reality of one person being able to earn enough money to support a family.

 

As Coontz and others’ careful research has shown, the institution of marriage has been in flux throughout human history. As economic models continue to shift, as technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, as social mores continue to evolve, my question for you today is, what do you want marriage to mean?

 

Certainly there are legal ramifications to the choices each of us makes moving forward. The politicians we elect are going to be making decisions about the definitions of marriage that will greatly affect our children and the children of many future generations. Should the right to marry be a right solely available to heterosexual couples? And, for that matter, why are church and state so intertwined around the institution of marriage?

 

The clergy of our religious institutions do not sign the legal document that is your birth certificate. The state provides a birth certificate, and the Christian church, for example, provides the ceremony and certificate of baptism. Why is there not a similar division of church and state around marriage? The state could provide the legal document of a marriage certificate, and religions would then be free to offer non-legally binding ceremonies of marriage. This would free religions to choose whether to offer marriage ceremonies to gay couples – if it was against their belief system, they could just choose not to, without infringing upon the state marriage rights of people of other religions.

 

While legalities are important, the realities of our lives are equally if not more important. As we saw during our intergenerational message today, there are all kinds of families, and all kinds of marriages, whether they are official in the eyes of the state or not.

 

I have experienced some of the varieties of family life outlined in the intergenerational message, with the changing composition of my family structure reflecting the changing nature of the institution of marriage. While the majority of my childhood was spent in a family with a traditional heterosexual marriage, I can still remember quite clearly the day at age thirteen when my parents sat me and my sister down to have the first “talk” about the possibility of them getting divorced. Six long years later, they did finally divorce. During this process, my dad came out to me and my sister as bi-sexual. When he moved out of our house, he moved in with his new partner Bob.

 

Bob, a white gay man, brought Crystal, an adopted African-American daughter, into what would become our newly blended family. So, in addition to a new step-father, I acquired a new step-sister as well. Except for at the time, same-sex marriage was not legal in Massachusetts. So while I was soon referring to Bob as my “second dad,” and Crystal as my sister, legally there was no connection between us. My father and Bob were fortunate to live in Massachusetts, and so several years later, they were able to make our new family format official, at least in the eyes of the state. While Bob has recently passed away from cancer, Crystal remains an integral part of our family.

 

My family is representative in many ways of the transition the institution of marriage continues to make in the world. My mom and dad married for love, back in the day. A series of challenges led them to choose divorce, only a legitimate option because my mother has the ability to join the labor force and was thus not economically dependent on my father. My dad felt empowered to come out as bi-sexual, and to enter into a relationship and live with another man. That man had an adopted child of another race. And eventually, when the law changed in Massachusetts, these two men were legally married. This entire sequence marks a profound shift in both cultural mores and legal precedents, as almost none of these steps except maybe divorce would have been possible even a hundred years ago.

 

These new lived realities are clearly visible in the political, economic and legal realms. The new choice that we have, the choice of love and hope for fulfillment of emotional needs, is a new lived reality that is worthy of further exploration. In fact for a people of faith, it demands further exploration.

 

How are we going to define marriage in our daily lives, as we struggle to form the deep, intimate relationship the term implies? How can we step out of the idealized images of marriage the media presents to us, and make meaning instead of the reality we live in? How do the gender roles that we learn from the culture we grow up in influence our actions in our relationships, and what steps do we need to take to more intentionally relate to our partners? If you and your partner were each to write a vision statement for where your relationship is currently at, and how you see it in the future, would they match?

 

I would like to suggest that living in equal and mutual relationship are two of the most important ideas and practices we can use in defining a religious vision of marriage. It is the expectation of many today that marriage means the joining of two equal parties, neither one holding significant power advantages over the other. An equal partnership means both people are working together to provide for their happiness and the happiness of their family. This notion of equality is an important one to hold up for awareness, as it has not always been essential or even part of the institution of marriage. Marriage has, in fact, systematically oppressed women for centuries, denying them property rights, denying them control over their children’s lives, and even denying them control over their own bodies.

 

I do not want to and will not pretend that we have eliminated all of these injustices. There are still economic disparities in our country for sure, and there are still far, far too many cases of domestic violence, far too many instances of husbands using the shield of marriage to dominate, control and abuse their wives. I will assume though, that by the nature of you being here in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, that we are at least on the same page in terms of belief. I will assume, based on our second principle of upholding “justice, equity and compassion in human relations,” that we all believe that partners in a marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex, should strive for equality.

 

Equality is a precondition for mutuality, but it isn’t mutuality itself. Mutuality means both parties taking responsibility for the relationship, and for caring for the other. We focus a great deal in our culture on the importance of the individual and on getting our individual needs met. It is important to have a strong sense of self, and to have your needs met in a relationship, but it also important to focus on each other, to have that sense of mutuality. This sense of mutuality, where both parties are loving towards each other in the way that the other needs, is in fact important to all relationships we enter into.

 

It is easy though to talk about mutuality in the abstract, and much harder to work towards intentionally creating a mutual space.

 

Since I haven’t been married, I’m going to use my relationship with my father as a concrete example of a shift towards mutuality. Until a few years ago, our relationship was a significant struggle. A turning point came when I realized that a large part of the struggle hinged on how he gave, and how I received, love. When I go home to visit my dad, he always makes sure the house is clean before I get there. I am never really sure why he does this, because it doesn’t matter to me. Clean house or not clean house, I am happy and excited to see him and the rest of my family. Then, on one of my visits home, we were having a conversation about what was going on in my life, and he said “I always tell people how proud I am of what you’re doing” and I turned to him and I said, “Dad, that’s great that you are telling other people that, but why aren’t you telling me that???” He didn’t really have a good answer to that question.

 

I was taking this very personally, and feeling rather unloved, when I received some excellent advice. I was asked, “Seth, if your Dad was speaking French, and you were speaking Japanese, would you still feel unloved, or would you realize that maybe you needed to learn to speak a little French?” That analogy really hit home for me. My dad was telling me he loved me, just in a different language.

 

Gary Chapman has written a wonderful series of books called The Five Love Languages, and this is precisely his hypothesis, that there are different love languages – words of affirmation, quality time, gift giving, acts of service, and physical touch. Going back to the example with my father, he was clearly showing me love via acts of service, while I was looking to receive it via words of affirmation. One of Chapman’s key arguments is that it behooves us to learn to speak the love language of our partners and family members. He suggests that unless both parties make an effort to offer love to the other in their “native” love language, they are not truly fostering a mutual relationship.

 

Another possible tool to use might be some of exercises in Harville Hendrix’s book Getting the Love You Want, where he suggests couples try Imago Dialogue. Imago Dialogue is a form of guided conversation aimed at increasing mutuality by moving partners away from trying to fix the other person, and instead towards listening more deeply to the feelings and emotions the other person is experiencing. Alternatively, there was an article in the most recent UU World magazine about a couple that’s created their own spiritual practice of mutuality, where once a week they share the stories of their lives, in detail, by working backward from the present until they have gone through the whole week.

 

These are but a few possible ways to intentionally bring a higher level of mutuality into a marriage. Perhaps none are the exact right fit for you or your partner, but I encourage you to think about different ways of enhancing the mutuality of your relationship. And single people, please don’t feel left out – as was clear in the story about me and my father, tools to enhance mutuality are useful across all of our relationships.

 

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The institution of marriage is not a static concept, it is one that is continuing to evolve. Marriage started as a way to help organize society both politically and economically, and only recently has it emerged as a choice that people make based on love. As marriage evolves, we in the present day have some say as to what it evolves into.

 

 

What if instead of being influenced by the realities of our parents marriage, we were to break the family patterns and begin to relate differently?

 

What if we were able to acknowledge that not all marriages are meant to last, and that divorce is sometimes a good and appropriate step forward?

 

What if instead of allowing culture and media to define marriage, we start to define marriage in terms of the values and beliefs that we hold dear?

 

 

Moving forward, let us be more intentional about the choices we make in the world, so that we create healthy relationships in our present lives, while modeling an institution of marriage for future generations that embraces loving, equal and mutual relationships.