AFTER CANA

By Blake Sittler

We always marry the ‘wrong’ person

My son Gabriel came home the other day and told me the school was having a dance on Friday afternoon in the gym. His friends decided together that they would ask their parents to help them each find one cool old retro song to bring to the dance.

I asked, “Cool old retro? Like Sinatra-retro or Joplin-retro?”

“No,” he replied, “Like old. 1980-retro.”

I Googled all the songs and bands I used to love in high school: Beastie Boys, April Wine, Maestro Fresh Wes, Rick Springfield. One classic video caught my attention.

A dad walks into his teenage son’s room and gives one of the most infamous parental rants of all time:

“Alright mister, what do you think you’re doing? You call this a room? This is a pigsty! Stand up straight! Tuck in that shirt! Adjust that belt buckle! Tie those shoes! Wipe that smile off your face! Do you understand? What kind of a man are you? You’re worthless and weak! You do nothing! You are nothing! You sit in here all day and play that sick, repulsive, electric twanger! I carried an M-16! And you carry that . . . that . . . that GUITAR! Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want to do with your life?”

The teen on his bed simply looks up and replies, “I wanna rock.”

Thus begins Twisted Sister’s anthem of teenage rebellion, We’re Not Gonna Take It!

Marriage is a vocation and the vocation we choose in life is our response to God’s question, “What do you want to do with your life?”

The vocation aspect of marriage is a choice, but it is also a promise.

Often most husbands and wives, during a difficult period in their marriage, will ask themselves, “Did I make the right choice?” The question rises almost wordlessly and sometimes lingers. It implies the followup question: “Who would have been my ‘right’ choice?”

This is where choice — as it tries to define the vocation of marriage — breaks down and fails. That is because, in the words of American theologian Richard Gaillardetz, we always marry the “wrong” person.

Brooke is a wonderful wife but would she be a better wife for someone else? Is there some man out there who could be a better husband to her? On a planet of nearly seven billion people, is there another person Brooke could be happier with? With whom she could have a holier marriage?
In short, the answer is, “Yes. Probably yes.”

But that is only if marriage is a choice, like a horse at the races or a new pair of shoes.

Vocation is the choice we make when we make a promise. This is not about contract or covenant. This is about giving your word.

I promise to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honour you all the days of our lives. Those were the words Brooke and I said at our wedding on May 26, 1995. You exchanged similar vows. That was the choice we all made. Those were the promises we exchanged.

Keeping promises like these is hard. They are promises only the desperately in love can make! If they really knew how angry, alone and defeated we’d feel in the bad times, anyone with a duck’s brain would head out the door. If only we could experience the sadness and loss of the difficult times of sickness and death, we would not be able to finish our wedding vows through our veil of tears.

Keeping promises like these calls for superhuman strength of character. Or grace. Grace that we cannot muster up, grace that we can only accept for the burden it sometimes is.

We are not judged by how we keep our promises when everything is working out fine. Our promise keeping is evaluated by how we keep our promises even when the deal is hard.

“Oh, I promised I’d help you move Saturday? Ooooo, this is awkward but something has come up. I won two tickets to this movie so I can’t help out.”

We don’t make these promises because of who we are; we make them because of who we want to be. These promises are our highest and clearest vision of what, in secular terms, is deemed character and, in Christian terms, as virtue.

Marriage is hard like that: we start the relationship making the biggest promise while knowing the least about the person, and, as we get to know each other’s faults better, it is only then that we are called upon to keep that old-fashioned promise.

But keeping a promise is not old-fashioned, it’s just cool old retro — and it’s what God wants us to do with our life.

Sittler works for the Diocese of Saskatoon in the office of Ministry Development and sits on the Diocesan Marriage Task Force. He and his wife Brooke have three children. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at aftercana@sasktel.net