The Point of Marriage

An interesting description of the point of marriage that regularly comes across my path. My challenges remain: how to paraphrase it (for it is to talk subversively of love in times where it has been rendered shallow, unsustaining, insipid, and self-serving; in times when genuine love is both longed for and feared); how to get inside it; and how to practically live out of it such that love grows more deeper and expansive; richer and more fearlessly and courageously healing and transformative…?

“…The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his [or her] solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming–in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky…”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke.

Comments

[Paul]

“The God who is love reorders our loves, bending our deepest desires back toward himself, so that we might rightly love our neighbors for his sake,” Smith writes in the book’s benediction. “The Spirit rehabituates our loves not merely for the sake of renovation but so that we can love even our enemies. This is what we were made for: to love what God loves.”

~ James K A Smith, from "You Are What You Love" (pub. 2016)
_________________

"At the highest level, our lives are directed toward some telos, or vision of the good life. Whether we are aware of it or not, we’re all oriented around some set of goals. As David Foster Wallace put it in his Kenyon commencement address, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships.” Some worship money, or power or popularity or nursing or art, but everybody’s life is organized around some longing. The heart is both a driving engine and a compass."

~ David Brooks, NY Times, "Putting Grit in It's Place"

[Frederick]

David Brooks as an "authority" on religion, or anything at all for that matter. - oh puleez!
In his book Thinking the Twentieth Century the very wise Tony Judt described Brooks as an ignorant bozo.