I’m an amateur artist. I love color, and I’ve always appreciated talented artists and their work. Sadly, I’m not a talented artist myself, nor have I been formally trained. The reason I paint is that my spiritual director, in the year of my ordination, told me I should paint. I did not want to at the time, but I decided to follow his instructions — after all, he has a rather extraordinary “word of knowledge” charism. So I went to the dollar store, purchased some cheap pastels and a pad of paper, and I began to draw and color a picture of some houses in the neighborhood. It was not that good, of course, but I felt as though I’d had a two-week holiday, just after coloring for an hour. So, I kept at it. I moved on to chalk pastels, then eventually to pastels on sandpaper, then to acrylics on canvas, and eventually iconography.
During my pastel phase, I took a workshop with Dave Becket, renowned Canadian pastel artist from Orillia, Ontario. Dave would paint a picture in front of us, so we could see the work develop and unfold before our eyes. It was amazing how, at any given stage in the process, the painting looked rough – nothing all that pretty, nothing for which any special talent was required. But he kept at it, and at it, and in the end we’d see the work suddenly come together in all its beauty.
Living out a marriage can very much be compared to producing a work of art. No marriage is a finished product; marriage is a process, as long as the spouses live. As Aristotle would say of a good life: “for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy” (NE, 1098a18). As with a work of art in progress, one might well see nothing special in the quality of a marriage at any given time. Most marriages might seem rough and unrefined – and certainly nothing very pretty.
We tend to think of marriages statically, as though we could measure their quality at a glance, as in the rather jejune expression “joy-filled” marriage. Anyone reading this who has ever worked on a painting or a sculpture is certainly aware that it is not always a joy, but often tedious; it is work. Similarly, in a marriage, there are moments of great joy, of course, and challenging moments, darkness and struggles – but the joy is really at the end, when we contemplate the work of beauty, as God does at the end of the six days of creation, looking at everything he had made “and indeed, it was very good” (Gn 1:31). And one only makes it to the end by staying the course: paying attention to details, persisting, refining, and doing the little things that the spouses learn from experience.
This brings me to another part of the analogy. I have two unfinished paintings in my art room, one of a farm with a broad field beneath a beautiful sky, another of a railway crossing in the country, both in Uxbridge, Ontario in autumn. I have also studied iconography – but I do not have any unfinished icons. When writing an icon, one begins with certain prayers, and when finished, it remains unsigned and is blessed with holy oil. The icon is considered a sacramental, not merely a painting. It is a window into the saint who is depicted, a point of contact, and so it is a holy object. I have to ask myself: why don’t I have any unfinished icons, but two large unfinished paintings?
I think the point is that the purpose is different. The two unfinished landscapes were painted for my own enjoyment. I wanted to capture the enjoyment of those scenes, for myself. The purpose in writing each icon I’d ever done, however, was devotion to the holy one depicted, i.e., an angel, the Theotokos, Christ Pantocrator, or the like. I’ve certainly finished paintings that were not icons, both acrylics and pastels, but I don’t have them; they were painted for friends and colleagues. I was able to finish them, to persist through the midpoint tedium, because they were done, not for myself, but for others.
Again, this lends itself well to highlighting an important aspect of married life. If a couple marries first and foremost for their own enjoyment or convenience, the marriage will almost always end in a separation and eventual divorce – like an unfinished work of art. The two simply cannot sustain the work. It’s very much like doing a painting so that I may enjoy it myself; after a time, the labor is often just not worth it, so I stop and move on to more interesting projects. But when it is for another – an icon that I am doing to offer religious inspiration and devotion, or simply a beautiful landscape that I want another to enjoy as I did when I saw it originally, I am able to endure and persist.
Sadly, the vast majority of people since the early 1960s have seen marriage as primarily an arrangement, one ordered to the pleasure, convenience, and enjoyment of the individuals involved. But marriage is first and foremost about the decision to love another for the other’s sake, completely and totally in all its implications – one of which is that divorce is not an option on the table. One should know that such a decision is not going to be easy, nor always a joy; it is a work in development, a work of beauty. It is not merely a sacramental, but a sacrament, an institution brought into being by God, based on the intention of the two involved. It is a sacred sign in motion.
I believe a significant factor in our lack of awareness of the deeply paschal significance of marriage has been a misreading of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 7:
“Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction.” (32-35).
Because it is a small portion of the entire chapter, taken out of its larger context, it is very easy to misinterpret; one can come away with the impression that the celibate or consecrated life is genuinely religious, while the married state is not. Such an interpretation, however, would run contrary to Paul’s overall teaching on marriage. In the larger context of this chapter, we see that Paul believes we are in the last period of salvation history. He refers to his own time as a time of distress, which in apocalyptic literature, is said to precede the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Paul writes: “So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife…. I tell you, brothers, the time is running out” (26-27; 29).
Today we would not advise single young people not to look for a spouse “because time is running out,” so what Paul says about those who are married and those who are not must be read in this context. Otherwise, we come away with the impression that marriage has nothing to do with serving the Lord. And of course, that would contradict what Paul teaches in Ephesians, where he speaks of the mystery of marriage as a sign of the love that Christ has for his Bride, the Church.
Christ’s love for his Bride and the love of a baptized husband for his baptized wife (and vice versa) are the very same type of love – a conjugal love. Marriage is just as religious a vocation as is the priesthood and consecrated life. While it, unfortunately, has not always been understood so by the faithful, marriage is a sacred sign that contains what it signifies, and what it signifies is the paschal mystery. For just as God called Abraham to leave the land of Ur and “go to the land that I will show you” (Gn 12:1), and just as God called Israel to leave Egypt behind with its pantheon of false gods, and just as Jesus leaves this world behind in order to go to the Father (Jn 17:19), so too in matrimony, two people are called to leave behind a world closed in upon itself; they are consecrated, that is, set apart, for they are called to leave behind their comfortable world of independence and self-sufficiency, to be given over to another, to belong completely to one another, in order to become part of something larger than their own individual selves – namely, the one-flesh institution that is their marriage. The couple relinquish their individual lives; they are no longer two individuals with their own independent existence. Rather, they have become one body, a symbol of the Church, which is one body with Christ the Bridegroom.
The lives of genuinely married couples are a witness of the Church’s response to Christ’s love for his Bride; they witness that love in their sacrificial love for one another and for the children who are the fruit of that marriage – and raising children well demands a tremendously sacrificial love. In giving themselves irrevocably and exclusively to one another, without knowing what lies ahead, a young couple die to their own individual plans; they die to a life directed by their own individual wills. In doing so, they find life, for they have become a larger reality.
When, on the other hand, a couple enters a marriage as though it were primarily about their own fulfillment, they inevitably become disillusioned. “Christ, what have I done? What have I done?” said Lynn Johnson, of the Up series, a year after her wedding. She readily acknowledged that her husband probably said much the same thing. She was disillusioned and had to make a decision. Thankfully, she made the right one.
When a generation has lost the sense of life as having a transcendent end and has settled for a purely earthly existence of self-fulfillment or self-realization, marriage simply makes no sense. It makes far more sense to simply cohabitate and maintain the freedom to move on more easily when things get difficult. It is no coincidence that marriage began to decline in the late Sixties, the age of individualism, which devolved into the hedonism of the Seventies and Eighties, and the nihilism of the Nineties. In the postmodern culture of the 21st Century, it continues to decline. Yet if young people were given a proper vision of the overall work that a married couple are called to create and the heroic virtue required to achieve this end, we might eventually hope to see a reversal.
Image: Adobe Stock. By александр таланцев.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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