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September 12, 1997 -- i was thinking again...
today my lake basks in the sunlight. the ducks and geese meander lazily
through the grass, or glide equally lazily over the water's surface.
a little kissing breeze slides over them all to meet me as i sit in my glider
on the deck. this is a day to play with your beloved.
when last did you say to her/him, "i love you" or "your fragrance makes me
tremble."
there is in mutual submission to one another an exquisite perfection that
exceeds the justice of mere words; like the delicate touch of sunlight drifting from such a high place through the morning mist and trees to kiss the leaves and flowers, and your skin. there is holiness here.
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marriage is not easy, i admit. it is a constant struggle within ourselves
with ourselves; the tension between needs: dependence/independence; loving
cooperation/detachment; giving myself/privatizing myself. it is an intense
invasion of privacy. the central demand of love is that it asks for everything;
not a little, not some, but everything. if you do not feel the challenge to
give everything, then you are not really in love.
no pain can compare to that which we experience in the place where we love.
for it is love itself that breaks us. the cost, the expense, the toll, is a
constant challenge to our capacity to love and be loved. in marriage, our
vulnerabilities cannot be hidden; they are exposed, exalted and exploited.
this is too much for some.
the important difference between those who hang on and those who run away
is the "place" inside themselves where the ruin occurs. for those who run
away from the intense fire of marriage, the ruin is a grieveous wound in that
wonderous, mysterious, delicate capacity of love inside themselves. this is
all too often a lifetime impairment.
for those who stand, hanging on to love through to its mortal completion,
the ruin occurs in the proper place of ego rather than love. to shipwreck ego
before the living God is just, to shipwreck your soul is quite another matter
to Him... and to you.
"The truth about marriage is that it is a way not of avoiding any of the
painful trials and subtractions of life, but rather of confronting them, of
exposing and tackling them most intimately, most humanly. It is a way to meet
suffering personally, head on, with the peculiar directness, the reckless
candidness characteristic only of love. It is a way of living life with no
other strategy or defense or protection than that of love. And so it is the
gradual unfolding of an amazing process of interpersonal consecration, a
process in which all the pain locked up in two lonely, self-centered lives is
no longer hidden or suppressed (as it tends to be everywhere else in life),
but rather released, released so that in the hands of love it might be used
as the raw material for sanctification. Marriage is a way not to evade
suffering, but to suffer purposefully." Mike Mason, The Mystery of
Marriage, Multnomah; forward by J.I. Packer.
marriage is a holy order because in it the meaning of holy is
interpreted in the light of its homonym wholly: for only through
wholeness of dedication can human life begin to approach wholeness, or holiness.
forsake not your beloved, nor the many little ways you can tell and show
how you cherish them.
...just thinking...
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