Having been sat in the pews for over 12 months at Holy Trinity, where I attended a wedding & a blessing of couples renewing their wedding vows, not to mention hearing the banns of marriage read regularly on a Sunday, it becomes hard to ignore the million dollar question: will I or won't I? Get married, I mean.
Obviously, I can't possibly answer that! I'm not in a relationship. The rest is out of my hands.
There are specific views about marriage that have been presented from the pulpit that I've had my time to chew over. I best enjoy marriage sermons when they speak first to values and next to community. Jesus is helpful too.
My dream vision cast from the pulpit would have to be that Jesus is the blesser and enabler of married life, that the Holy Spirit can make it less painful and God will not leave us, if we are married or not. Marriage, however, is clearly not about one person. When you're single, it's relatively easy to forget that.
I'll take heart, because Jesus did not preach blessed are the married. You can have a vocation to be married or single and neither is better in the eyes of God who made us. We are told again and again that marriage and singleness are equal in God's measures of performance.
This is dandy until you begin to explore Christian bookshelves, sermon archives and DVD libraries. I'm thankful I have hundreds of years of art history and the linked stories of the monastic traditions to draw on , since this is what I studied for my degree, because there's a strong bias towards correcting the problems of marriage, including the probable outcomes of most marriages – children, in contemporary Christian life.
Less emphasis is placed on nurturing singleness as a healthy, whole and redeemed lifestyle that can feed God's people, saved and unsaved.
(Disclaimer: we could say the whole Reformation was a by product of the desire to address singleness and its abuses of power through the Catholic priesthood and some very naughty monks, but perhaps that would be stretching a point.)
There are times I find the great divide troubling. I've spent the majority of my adult singleness unkempt, unemployed, seemingly unlikeable much of the time. If this sounds like a hard luck story then you're right. I find I don't tell it well enough.
I suppose a dream of mine is to find a man who would help me tell the story of my singleness in a way that is relevant to everyone, married or unmarried. If that man happens to be Jesus then I will be delighted. And if it's not then he will need a strong stomach.
Moving on for now, to explore my delineation of married or single further, I've poked around in the Right Now Media catalog and found a few fig leaves.
For those not in the know, Right Now Media is a 'Christian Netflix' filled with online video resources to equip individuals, small groups and churches.
Why do I say fig leaves? Of course, fig leaves were what Adam and Eve wore to cover their nakedness in the Garden of Eden.
What do I believe is being covered?
In many teachings I have found the danger of entitlement is covered by modest words (like 'respect') that don't expose the male addictions that have fueled the misery of my single life, hurts from which, I am sure, could be easily taken into my marriage if I married a man who was unaware of how his behaviours and the behaviours of his gender intersected with my personal histories and pain.
And also, (and I'm really sorry about this), but also, the behaviours of his father, and the behaviours of his father's father and so on and how those patterns have/will/may affect me and any male or female children I may have in the future.
I'm sorry, men, if this seems unfair. Just as all women have to concern themselves with sanitary products until they reach a certain age, and sexually active women must make an ethical choice over contraception or risk falling pregnant, so all men are left with a legacy when interacting with the opposite sex that is not as much about their unique personality, positive traits and achievements, as it is about the hedonistic powers given to their social group.
Responsible men are perhaps mortified that there is a small subset who gratify emotional needs at the expense of women rather than with their consent. And if I ever have a husband I would like to fully and wholeheartedly consent to him, and ask consent for him, from the Lord, to always be changing, improving, healing and stretching. Because not all women find, from experience, that they are that fortunate.
Hang on for part 2.