The eCrozier

I just finished reading Jason Micheli’s Living in Sin: Making Marriage Work Between I Do and Death. If I were still preparing couples for marriage as a parish priest, then I’d make sure those couples read this book well before they stood in the church and made their vows. It’s also a hilarious read for those who desire to examine their lives. It’s brutally honest, as in: “Every married person knows they suck because every married person knows the person to whom they’re married knows just how much they suck. In marrying another, we meet, maybe for the first time, the worst version of ourselves.”

Don’t read this book unless you’re able to deal with truth like that. Or better yet, read this book so maybe you can start dealing with the truth you’ve been in denial about. Micheli goes on: “seeing others as our spouses see us, as bound and unfree, is the easiest way to find patience and empathy for others. It’s when you mistakenly think people are free that you get pissed off at them. When you see people as active agents of everything in their lives, choosing the crap decisions they make, you can confuse what they do for who they are.”

Micheli is on to something really important here and it’s not just about marriage. All of us go through life assuming other people are different than we are, that is, completely able to plan, calculate, and pull off all sorts schemes without a hitch. That’s why when another person does something that hurts us, we so often assume it was premeditated just to mess up our lives. So, by ascribing a high level of agency to them, we imagine their intent was directed right at us. Now, occasionally that’s true, but more often than not, from my experience at least, the person in question was just as clueless as I’d be as to why they did what they did. Most often, they didn’t think, plan, and calculate. They just did what they did without thinking about how it might be received by others. That’s why our actions so often result in sinful behavior. If that doesn’t sound familiar to you, then I say with all forceful gentleness: You’re not paying attention to your own life.

Marriage to another simply puts all our personal issues “on steroids.” It hyperactivates all our worst qualities for our beloved to see and, unfortunately at times, endure. Marriage then, maybe more than any other relationship, can help us learn what God intends in the grace poured out by Jesus. We receive undeserved mercy and we also learn to give undeserved mercy. It’s a learning process because “an eye for an eye” is what comes natural to us. Mercy (which is grace incarnated) isn’t natural. It has to be cultivated in us. That’s why Micheli contends that when a couple says, “I do” in their vows, they aren’t saying “I can,” in spite of what they think they’re intending. Because they can’t keep those vows without the imputation of God’s grace in their lives. Without grace, they’ll be locked in the never-ending cycle of scorekeeping for the latest wrong the other has clumsily perpetrated.

Or to put it the way Micheli so rawly writes: “The love that can make marriage work between “I do” and death, in other words, is the love with which Christ loved us—a love that died for us while we yet sucked.”

+Scott