Crushed like a grape
If ever a book was divinely inspired, it is The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason. Every page is a revelation. Try this:
"Socially, legally, physically, emotionally, every which way, there is just no other means of getting closer to another human being, and never has been, than marriage. Such extraordinary closeness is bought at a cost, and the cost is nothing more or less than one's own self. No one has ever been married without being shocked at the enormity of this price and at the monstrous inconvenience of this thing called intimacy that suddenly invades one's life."
The best is yet to come. Mike knows the answer to the question: why is loving so hard to do? "All of life is, in one way or another, humbling. But there is nothing like the experience of being humbled by another person and by the same person day in and day out. It can be exhausting, unnerving, infuriating, disintegrating. There is no suffering like the suffering involved in being close to another person. But neither is there any joy nor any real comfort at all outside intimacy, outside the joy and comfort that are wrung out like wine from the crush and ferment of two lives being pressed together."
Like a humble grape, being crushed in a wine press.
When I hear anyone's story of suffering in marriage, I recall the days I spent wandering around that farm in the New England for 10 days alone after meeting my future wife. Thinking there was something momentous about to happen, teetering on the edge of a chasm that I wanted to fall into to. Sinking, surrendering to the overwhelming power of love, with the feeling deep inside that danger and suffering awaited me there. I couldn't run away, but I yearned that the cup be taken away. The suffering of loving is as inevitable for me and you as it was for Christ in the Garden.
Surrendering to it does not make it any less painful. But it does give meaning to the pain.
The Garden was called Gethsename. I was looking just now, before posting this, for an image and came across the fact that the word Gethsemane is Aramaic for "place of the wine press".
We are all of us in the Garden of Love, Marissa.
"Socially, legally, physically, emotionally, every which way, there is just no other means of getting closer to another human being, and never has been, than marriage. Such extraordinary closeness is bought at a cost, and the cost is nothing more or less than one's own self. No one has ever been married without being shocked at the enormity of this price and at the monstrous inconvenience of this thing called intimacy that suddenly invades one's life."
The best is yet to come. Mike knows the answer to the question: why is loving so hard to do? "All of life is, in one way or another, humbling. But there is nothing like the experience of being humbled by another person and by the same person day in and day out. It can be exhausting, unnerving, infuriating, disintegrating. There is no suffering like the suffering involved in being close to another person. But neither is there any joy nor any real comfort at all outside intimacy, outside the joy and comfort that are wrung out like wine from the crush and ferment of two lives being pressed together."
Like a humble grape, being crushed in a wine press.
When I hear anyone's story of suffering in marriage, I recall the days I spent wandering around that farm in the New England for 10 days alone after meeting my future wife. Thinking there was something momentous about to happen, teetering on the edge of a chasm that I wanted to fall into to. Sinking, surrendering to the overwhelming power of love, with the feeling deep inside that danger and suffering awaited me there. I couldn't run away, but I yearned that the cup be taken away. The suffering of loving is as inevitable for me and you as it was for Christ in the Garden.
Surrendering to it does not make it any less painful. But it does give meaning to the pain.
The Garden was called Gethsename. I was looking just now, before posting this, for an image and came across the fact that the word Gethsemane is Aramaic for "place of the wine press".
We are all of us in the Garden of Love, Marissa.
posted by Michael Kiely at 10:02 pm
Buy your Self Defence Guide to Marriage now!
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