May 3: "Divorce," Marriage, "Bliss"

Billy Collins on unwedded bliss . . . 

Divorce

by:  Billy Collins

No more heavy ball,

just the sound

of the dragged chain

with every other step.

This poem is a little cynical.  I suppose anyone who has experienced marital problems understands Collins' point, though.  Even after a marriage ends, the two people involved will still be linked in some way forever--in memory or children or therapy or photos or music or poetry.

Next year, my wife and I will celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary.  There are some people who would have bet large sums of money that we would never reach that milestone, myself included at times.  It has been a rollercoaster of three decades.  Because of mental illness and addiction, our marriage has teetered on the brink of collapse a few times.  But here we are.  Still together.  In love.  

The term "wedded bliss" paints a landscape of idyllic days and nights suffused with impressionistic light.  But I know that marriage is not a Monet painting of water lilies.  Marriage is hard, hard work.

I say all this with zero cynicism.  It's the absolute truth in my experience.  But that hard work is worth it in my experience, as well.

Saint Marty is blissed out on gratitude tonight.

Bliss

by:  Martin Achatz

Sometimes it's wedded.

Sometimes you follow it.

It's sometimes ignorance.

But tonight it's a woodwind

section of peepers

tuning their voices

to spring.

August 29: Ultimate Question, Suffering and Love, Marriage

More on having dinner with white mice, discussing the Ultimate Question . . .

With a brief nod to the rest of the company he [Slartibartfast] turned and walked sadly out of the room

Arthur stared after him, not knowing what to say.

"Now," said Benjy mouse, "to business."

Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together.

"To business!" they said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Benjy.

Ford looked round.

"Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast," he said.

The two mice scuttled impatiently around in their glass transports.  Finally they composed themselves, and Benjy moved forward to address Arthur.

"Now, Earth creature," he said, "the situation we have in effect is this.  We have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for the last ten million years in order to find this wretched thing called the Ultimate Question."

"Why?" said Arthur sharply.

"No--we already thought of that one," said Frankie, interrupting, "but it doesn't fit the answer.  Why?  Forty Two . . . you see, it doesn't work."

"No," said Arthur, "I mean, why have you been doing it?"

"Oh, I see," said Frankie.  "Well, eventually just habit I think, to be brutally honest.  And this is more or less the point--we're sick to the teeth with the whole thing, and the prospect of doing it all over again on account of those whinnet-ridden Vogons quite frankly gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, you know what I mean?  It was by the merest  lucky chance that Benjy and I finished our particular job and left the planet early for a quick holiday, and have since manipulated our way back to Magrathea by the good offices of your friends."

"Magrathea is a gateway back to our own dimension," put in Benjy.

"Since when," continued his murine colleague, "we have had an offer of a quite enormously fat contract to do the 5D chat show and lecture circuit back in our own dimensional neck of the woods, and we're very much inclined to take it."

"I would, wouldn't you, Ford?" said Zaphod promptingly.

"Oh yes," said Ford, "jump at it, lake a shot."

Arthur glanced at them, wondering what all this was leading up to.

"But we've got to have product, you see," said Frankie.  "I mean, ideally we still need the Ultimate Question in some form or other."

Zaphod leaned forward to Arthur.

"You see," he said, "if they're just sitting there in the studio looking very relaxed and, you know, just mentioning that they happen to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and then eventually have to admit that in fact it's Forty-two, then the show's probably quite short.  No follow-up, you see."

"We have to have something that sounds good," said Benjy.

"Something that sounds good?" exclaimed Arthur.  "An Ultimate Question that sounds good?  From a couple mice?"

The mice bristled.

I think we all go through our days asking questions.  What am I going to have for breakfast?  What idiotic thing did Donald Trump tweet this morning?  Should I pack the leftover pizza for lunch?  Why am I so tired?  Is my car going to start?  Like I said, each 24-hour period is just a series of questions in search of answers.

Most daily questions are small, inconsequential.  For example, I could answer the questions in the previous paragraph with the following 21 words:
1.  Life cereal.
2.  I don't care.
3.  The answer to pizza is always "yes."
4.  I stayed up way too late last night.
5.  Yes.

However, there are always the big questions, the ultimate questions, that are more difficult, perhaps even unanswerable.  These questions haunt us all.  What is the meaning of life?  Why do good people have to suffer?  What's love go to do with it?  (Okay, I stole that last one from Tina Turner.)  The answers to these questions are really impossible to discern without lapsing into subjective observations.  The meaning of my life, you see, is different than the meaning of your life.

The question that I've been wrestling a great deal with recently is about suffering and love.  I've been married for almost 25 years.  Those years have been filled with all kinds of joy and happiness.  The birth of children.  Wonderful trips (Hawaii, New York City, Walt Disney World, California).  Milestones (anniversaries, first days of school, last days of school, graduations, new jobs).  And simple quiet times of togetherness.

Of course, there have been struggles.  A lot of them.  Mental illness.  Money.  Addiction.  Suicides.  Deaths.  Health scares.  It's a very human thing, I think, to forget the good times and focus more on the bad times.  It would be amazing if all the days of marriage were like the first days of marriage, full of passion and surprise and sex and romance.  Marriage isn't like that, however.  To sustain that honeymoon state is impossible.

Instead, marriage is about how love matures into deep, abiding friendship and trust.  Passion is important, but, over the years, two shared lives settle into rhythms and cycles.  Out of necessity, routines emerge.  That's how everyone survives in this hectic world.  A person who thrives on chaos and turmoil will eventually flame out like a comet in the atmosphere.  That kind of existence simply isn't sustainable.  In fact, I would venture to say that it's unhealthy.

I believe in marriage.  It's a sacred thing--two people joining their lives, creating something that didn't exist before.  It's mysterious and beautiful and confounding and maddening and sustaining.  My wife knows me better than anyone else on this planet.  I think I can say the same for her.  She knows my weaknesses and fears.  I know her weaknesses and fears.  And it's in that knowing that marriage survives.

Sure, there are droughts in every marital union.  Boredom even.  Temptations.  Yet, at the end of the day, it's about knowing who you can count on when your life is at its lowest.  When depression sets in.  When bills are plentiful and money is scarce.  When the biopsy comes back positive.  That is when marriage is most important.  When it carries you through the dark valleys.

If you are in a relationship with someone you care about deeply, here is what you should do tonight, whether you've known each other five days or fifty years.  Look into that person's eyes.  Say how important she or he is to you.  Mean it with all your heart.  Count yourself lucky because you share your life with your best friend.

Saint Marty really does believe that love always wins in the end.

August 9: Failure of Imagination, Marilynne Robinson, Immensity of Love

But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.

Dillard writes about God and faith all the time.  Her understanding of the natural world is filtered through the lens of Christianity.  When she sees a muskrat or monarch butterfly or the Perseid meteor shower, she knows all the sciences--biological and ecological and astronomical.  But she also nurtures a sizable sense of awe and grace.  Dillard is a rarity:  a serious Christian writer.

Christianity has gotten a bad rap in recent times.  This has something to do with small-minded conservatives who disguise their small-mindedness as a form of Christianity.  For example, they claim homosexuality is an affront to Christianity, even though nowhere in the Bible does Jesus Christ utter a single statement about homosexuality.  How about this one:  marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman?  Donald Trump, the Chosen One for many so-called Christians in the current United States presidential election, must really believe in the sanctity of marriage:  he's done it three times.

One of the best Christian writers working today, Marilynne Robinson, says this about the current state of politics and religion:  "Something called Christianity has become entangled in exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word."  Robinson gets it on a deep level.  She sees the danger in this brand of Christianity.

No, I'm not getting on a soapbox tonight.  My point is that I appreciate the fact that there are writers like Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson.  They don't water down their Christianity when they write.  They embrace it in complex and meaningful ways.  It's not an easy faith they write about.  It's real faith, sometimes full of questions and doubt.  That's a faith I understand.  That's my brand of Christianity.

My faith is limited by smallness, as Dillard said in the quote above.  My imagination sometimes doesn't allow me to embrace the immensity of love that exists in God's heart.  All I see is what my limited vision allows.  Dillard and Robinson see something grander in their writing.

That's the kind of writer Saint Marty wants to be.

January 8: Put It Behind You, Strength of Love, Marriage

[Ives and his wife] moved downtown from Claremont Avenue some ten years before, in '84, after their apartment had been burglarized and because Annie though the change would do her husband good.  His stubborn inability to stop mourning their son, to keep his sorrow hidden from others but to let it flourish around her, had tempted Annie to leave him several times over the years.  But she loved him too much.  Again and again, she told him, "You have to put it behind you, my love," but as the years passed, nearly thirty of them, with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, he still could not get a certain image out of his head:  his righteous and good son, stretched out on the sidewalk, eyes glazed and looking upward, suddenly aware and saddened that his physical life was ending, that image coming to Ives again and again.

Edward and Annie's marriage is tested in Mr. Ives' Christmas.  Ives simply cannot stop mourning.  For three decades, he keeps reliving the loss of his son.  Every day.  Every hour.  Ives is angry and sad and confused.  He does a good job of hiding these feelings from everybody but his wife, who bears the heavy burden of her husband's profound sorrow.  She contemplates leaving him, but she can't.  She loves him too much.

Many aspects of this novel move me.  However, the depth of love between Ives and Annie moves me the most deeply.  It's a love that has to endure great loss (the death of a child).  Yet it endures.  Because that's the power of love, full of sacrifice and struggle and hope.

Yes, I'm going to get a little sentimental in this post.  My marriage has endured a lot of hardships.  At one point, it even seemed as though it simply wasn't going to survive.  My wife was living in another town, a hundred miles distant.  I was raising our daughter by myself, with a lot of help from my family and my wife's family.  It was one of the darkest times of my life.  Some days, I would drag myself out of bed in the morning, drag myself through my work day, and then drag myself home.  It was like moving in slow motion every second.  And every second was a little painful.


But I didn't give up.  I took care of my daughter, and I tried to act with love and understanding toward my spouse (I didn't always succeed).  It wasn't easy.  But marriage isn't always easy.  It takes work and compassion and compromise.  This coming October, my wife and I will celebrate our twentieth anniversary.  Twenty years.  We have two beautiful children who know that they are loved and cherished.  We have a home.  And we have each other.  That's love.  Through the darkness and the light.  Annie Ives knows this.

Saint Marty knows it, too.

Someone who knew a great deal about love