On Marriage

 This was going to be an essay on "Faith" but then I had a Twitter thread on Marriage go viral (at least by the standards of my account) so I decided to flesh things out a little more. If you're dropping in from that thread, welcome! Take a look around! I hope you find something that feeds you.

 When my spouse and I were discerning if we wanted to marry, I was also discerning if I had a call to ordained ministry. During one of these conversations, I pulled out my Book of Common Prayer, in possibly one of the most Episcopalian moves of our entire courtship, and first opened up page 423, the first page in the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage. There, it says: 

"[Marriage] signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord."

My spouse was raised Catholic, so none of this was especially new theological content, but all of this was complicated by the fact that they are nonbinary, and both of us were bisexual. (I still identified as a woman, but I knew from past relationships that being expected to be the "good little wifey" would never work for me.) Neither of us had a wealth of long-term queer relationships in our communities to look to-- we'd been raised in rural, conservative, and overwhelmingly Catholic communities and families. All the examples of marriage we had were those between cisgender, straight couples, and we'd both been raised soaked in patriarchy and purity culture. We'd been exposed to so many obviously miserable married couples. We'd heard more than our fair share of jokes about bad sex, mutual resentment, inevitable affairs, and "staying together for the kids." We didn't want that for ourselves. So my question to my then-kissmate was, "Is this a model we can buy into?" Setting aside the miserable marriages we'd witnessed, we'd both also seen the way a healthy marriage can be transformative, life-giving, and undeniably good. We talked about the common qualities that those marriages had: mutual respect, good communication, a willingness to sacrifice for the other but also to be considerate and grateful for those sacrifices, and a rejection of sustaining models of relation out of tradition or to seek the approval of those outside the marriage. The most successful marriages we both saw involved at least some level of doing what worked for them not just relying on common sense. 

Then I flipped to page 532 in the Book of Common Prayer. I was discerning a call to ministry, at that time supposing I was probably called to the priesthood, so I had been wrestling for some time with the Examination. Could I commit to those vows? But then, I read this aloud:

"Will you do your best to pattern your life [and that of your family, or household, or community] in  accordance with the teachings of Christ, so that you  may be a wholesome example to your people?"

"Are you okay with this?" I asked. To my mind, this wasn't just a promise on my behalf. This was a promise on behalf of my spouse and any children we may have. I knew my fair share of pastor's kids growing up. I knew the pressure they often felt. I also knew from talking to spouses of clergy how often they were expected to also be ministers in their own capacity. I'd been to Women's Bible Studies led by dutiful pastors wives. One of my past kissmates had been the grandchild of a country preacher whose wife was as much a leader of their church as he was. While I knew there was no firm rule in our tradition to dictate that my spouse be a churchgoer let alone a minister in their own right, I had to be able to make this promise, and mean it. Could my spouse, who had struggled so much with their upbringing in the Church, and until we'd started dating, had no interest in returning, be willing to commit to this? I didn't want to have to decide between this relationship and my call, but I also knew that I couldn't ignore what God was calling me to anymore. My whole life had seemed listless and disordered until I'd started "following my gut," and responding to the Holy Spirit.

"If this is what you feel called to do with your life, I'll help you in any way I can," they replied. 

We had many, many more conversations leading up to our engagement. We came into our premarital counseling, the summer after my first year in seminary, with a phenomenal amount of clarity about our shared vision for our life together. We knew what we were about. We'd worked together with our priest to put together a ceremony that reflected our values and desires for this new thing we were doing together.We used the liturgical resources from "I Will Bless You And You Will Be a Blessing" since we understood our relationship to be closer in character to what it laid out than what was laid out in the Book of Common Prayer. Leading up to the wedding, we repeatedly read over the vows in conversation:

In the name of God,
I... give myself to you... and take you to myself
I will support and care for you:
in times of sickness, in times of health.
I will hold and cherish you:
in times of plenty, in times of want.
I will honor and love you:
in times of anguish, in times of joy,
forsaking all others, as long as we both shall live.
This is my solemn vow.

We could not have known five years ago what those times of sickness, want, and anguish would look like. Nobody can. Would we have listened anyway, as confident as we were in our love and fidelity? Probably not. On the other hand, we couldn't have possibly imagined the joy and abundance we would experience. Countless times, I've told friends and family how grateful I am that God brought us together. I know that, as we journey together, we are going to change, and that that change will be painful and uncomfortable and will test us. But the key is that we have promised, before God, before one another, and before our community, that we will face this life together.

I remember having a conversation with a newlywed lesbian in the months leading up to my own wedding, where she expressed doubt about how we could make marriage work if one of us had an identity under the transgender umbrella. "What if they wake up one day and realize they're actually a woman, or would rather be with a man?" She asked. I had to take a moment to think through a loving response. 

"Well, I'll remember my vows. I will support and care for them, whatever that looks like, and we'll figure things out." I replied.

I know many people for whom coming out as transgender has destroyed their marriage, because they entered into that marriage with a whole host of cisgender, straight assumptions about what that relationship would look like... about who did what and what was owed to one another. I don't presume to imagine that somehow our marriage is exceptional. We're normal people who get on each other's nerves sometimes, get grumpy, and get gassy at inopportune moments. Sometimes communication breaks down. But we've tried, whenever we can tell things are falling out of order, to remember our vows. Marriage is a discipline-- we're going to make mistakes and have to turn, again and again and again, and reorient ourselves to the promises we've made. We made no promises to obey one another. There's no presumption of control or hierarchy. We both made the exact same promises: to support, to care, to hold, to cherish, to honor, and to love. How that's lived out day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year, has changed-- will change. The promises do not. 

There's a tradition on one side of my family of offering "devotions" at bridal and baby showers. An elder matriarch offers some scripture and reflection on that scripture with advice for how to best live into this new way of life the woman being honored that day was about to embark upon. These have overwhelmingly been profoundly patriarchal messages. "This is going to be unimaginably hard. Put all your trust in God and sacrifice yourself anyway. Care for everyone else first. Don't put yourself first. The only way to make this work is to be a martyr for this cause." As I've lived into the very same life stages, but in a queer, egalitarian context, it's been harder and harder for me to sit respectfully and listen to these teachings, especially when offered as explicitly Christian teachings. I take my faith in Jesus no less seriously than those well-meaning matriarchs, but when I've encountered people who have been in marriages that exemplify the patriarchal ideal, they've been miserable, destructive, death-dealing enterprises. Every truly happy straight marriage I've encountered has subverted some aspect of the patriarchal ideal, even if those involved will swear up and down that they don't. 

The patriarchal ideal of marriage isn't life-giving. It's not liberating. It's not set up for the mutual joy and flourishing of both people in the marriage. It necessarily presumes that the parties in the relationship are fundamentally unequal. Therefore, any presumption of mutuality implies that what will be given by each will be unequal. 

When people push back against feminism or egalitarianism, it is often with the statement that "men and women are different." That is true, in that every human has a different personality, different gifts and talents, and different life experiences, which they bring to their relationships. It is also true that folks with more feminine qualities are different from folks with more masculine qualities. The question is not the difference. Rather, the question is that do those differences necessarily imply a difference in human dignity and authority which dictates automatically how two people are to relate to one another? The Christian response to this, I would argue, based on both the Gospel and the writings of St. Paul, is overwhelmingly no. The Body has many, many parts which function differently, true, but as Paul says, no one has any more value than another. 

The problem with patriarchal marriages, because they presume that all men by their nature must be the executive head of their household, and that all women by their nature must be subservient within their household, is that it denies the particular variety of gifts, talents, and personalities of individual men and women as given to them by their Creator. Often, it perverts those gifts into burdens by declaring them failures to conform to the roles expected by that patriarchal structure. A man with a gentle, nurturing heart who excels at caregiving is seen as being too soft. A woman with an argumentative nature who isn't naturally sweet or yielding is seen as being unladylike. 

Those natural attributes, presumably given them by their creator, are seen as malformations, rather than gifts, that must be corrected, first by parents, later by the self, and if necessary, through social reinforcement. So girls are told to be quiet. Boys are told to be tough. Children which do not conform are teased and cajoled into conformity or else ostracized. 

By the time they begin to seek a partner in adulthood, women have been so trained to not speak up, and men have been so trained to exert control, through violence if necessary, that they cannot communicate healthfully with one another. They cannot live together in the full authenticity of their being. And far too often, things become abusive and unbearable.

In his letter to the Church in Galatia, St. Paul writes, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." In Christ, we are all free to live fully, to use the gifts that God gives us for the benefit of the Kingdom of God. What is left is for us to discern how to be a good steward of what God has given us. Our question as Christians, when we enter into the covenant of marriage, is how can we best keep the promises we make. The dynamics of those relationships will look different in every case and will certainly be informed by the masculine and feminine characteristics each member of the couple brings to the table. Regardless, Paul reminds the Church that, what counts in our relations is not our differences which confer social status in the world, but rather our equality under God as Christ's own people. If Marriage is an expression in microcosm of this broader social framework, any approach to it which presumes a difference in status at its foundation is not, cannot, be of Christ.