Marriage as a Spiritual Path: The Soul's Mirror
The following is an excerpt from a response that Richard wrote to a request for some guidance in preparation for an upcoming marriage
It was a pleasure speaking with you last Saturday. I have such a good feeling about the way you are approaching the ceremony of your marriage, the creativity and sincerity, and the lovely way you are including your family and friends.
You asked that I suggest some questions to help focus your own interior preparation. I feel humble before the task of helping to mirror to each of you the sacred possibility of marriage as I feel that I am just a beginner in this myself. In my life, nothing has mattered more and been more challenging than to overcome (a little) my own narcissistic tendencies and learn to let love flower in our marriage. I believe my wife would say something similar.
As I write this I ask myself, why has it mattered so much? And I know and simultaneous don't really know. It matters because, for me, there is no clearer mirror for my (our) relationship to God, than this marriage in which I have finally accepted the wisdom of no escape. And I don't know why it matters, not because I cannot think of many genuine reasons, but because even to hold marriage in the way I have grown to understand it and offer myself to it, is grace. That grace has led me despite myself, and doubtless continues to do so in ways and toward possibilities I am unable yet to understand. That grace is and will continue to lead you as well if you surrender to it, if you now know that you will not run away (for too long) or close your hearts (for too long) no matter what the apparent circumstances. This then is to me the first and premier aspect necessary for the grace of marriage and what can allow marriage to become a sacred chalice: unequivocal commitment.
Your marriage is something that you are each individually and together creating moment by moment, look by look, thought by thought, word by word, action by action. The ceremony itself just initiates and consecrates that intention. Your commitment to each other will become the chalice for your on-going realization of spirit, for the best intention isn't enough, it is and must be met by something that comes from the divine. As I said in our conversation, marriage takes its reality from the depth of your own humanity and enlightenment, from your own realization of the meaning of life and the obligation of consciousness. To marry is to accept a real loss of freedom at one level in order to invite the potential of liberation at other levels. I look upon your marriage as something that you are consecrating not only to each other, but to a potential that neither of you can fully grasp yet, nor which can ever be completely fulfilled. In this sense, it is not merely your marriage, it belongs to something more. Perhaps we could say that it belongs to the evolutionary potential of humanity or even to the gradual collective incarnation of Love itself. This is the sacred obligation of marriage, that it is offered to and for something beyond your own personal happiness and fulfillment.
With respect to actual areas or questions to reflect on, I suggest you each privately have a conversation/confession with God (however you conceive of That). Tell "God" what you believe you are giving yourself to in the deepest sense, and why you accept this burden and gift, why, at this point in your life, you want to make this choice. This is the most important contemplation, for you must envision a spiritual chalice into which you will be offering and submitting yourself for life's deeper purpose. But, our deepest intentions are always to one degree or another betrayed by our psychology. Therefore, sincerely request assistance in meeting your own demons of self-protection that close your heart. You already know ways in which you create or rationalize "wiggle" room and you must sincerely ask forgiveness to be able to find a new relationship to those dynamics. Forgiveness is the inner mystery through which we release the power of pain to close our hearts. For a marriage to thrive, you have to be able to forgive the pain you receive from each other, or cause each other, without necessarily condoning the behaviors. It is our sobering capacity to wound and eventually kill love that we must let shame us, humble us, and cause us to be vigilant about what we bring to each other. It is never your individual responsibility to try to change the other, you have power only over yourself.
Marriage is work, a great work. You must each willingly re-consecrate yourself to a higher relationship and then, in faith, allow That to mature you and transform you. When I say "higher relationship", I do not mean an idealized relationship. Nothing kills spontaneity and aliveness more than trying to conform yourselves to some ideal. It is not to an ideal form that you seek to submit yourselves to, but something renewed again and again in the spirit of your own sacred willingness to realize the power of love in your lives. And this by offering yourselves (each in your own original way, out of your own ever- emerging understanding and in the most private core of your heart) to love. As St. Dominic said, "Who loves love, loves." The paradox is that speaking in this way makes "love" seem like something outside of oneself that you have to be obedient to if you are to succeed in loving. And there is an element of that. But the obedience is to love, not to the other in order to get love. To be obedient to love is profound intelligence. What I have gradually begun to understand is that to love love, and to willingly and gladly offer one's behaviors and thoughts to love, is to live from my own deeper Self. And that is freedom.
I suggest you make a list of the ways that you feel you could betray your own deepest intent to love love. I mean very concretely: the kinds of thoughts, the specific emotions, the actual behaviors. For example, suppose one of you doesn't feel seen and mirrored by the other when you enthusiastically tell the other something about your day, your insights, etc. Like most of us, when we don't feel that we are being mirrored by someone, especially someone close to us, you might (it happens in an instant) revisit the archaic childhood feelings of abandonment and non-being, and become bitchy, verbally cutting, and say things like......(What would you say? How would you act?) The key to this work is not to be abstract. You must be very specific. What would you feel? What would you say? How would you act?
Make the architecture of your contracted/reactive patterns as conscious as possible. Remember them (by looking at memories of contracted times), feel them, so that when these structures arise, as they inevitably will, you can look right at them and know that they are only a partial reflection of the complex dynamic that is a committed marriage. The consecration you are making to each other is to create a circle of commitment that is large enough to hold any conflict, even temporary feelings of hate. Ask yourselves what triggers contraction between the two of you, where are you vulnerable to regressing, withdrawing, attacking? What kinds of mirroring or the lack of it threatens you? What are your strategies for control, for approval, for safety, when you feel threatened. I know that each of you is not naïve about the power of fear or pain to betray your deepest aspirations to be loving and compassionate. The crucial thing to remember is that if you are aware of these negative patterns, you are already -- at another level of yourselves -- more than those contracted states. By developing a non-judgmental awareness about the contractions, regardless of who initiated the problem, you can learn how to address differences without wounding yourselves or each other too severely. Committed relationship is probably the most profound context for being able to realize your larger Self in a way that is not transcending or avoiding your vulnerability or any part of your humanity, but truly realizing a higher potential in yourselves and between each other.
I believe that marriage is a movement in faith, that it is not about the fiction of happiness, but about the reality of friction and the transformation of the narcissistic character structure (in each of us) through a willingness to really make our actions a sacred gift to Love. It is hard work, but truly wondrous. You can build a vessel in which that friction teaches you to open your hearts unconditionally because you are being brought back, again and again, to a more direct relationship to Self. Faith is a very private thing, it is your own very intimate relationship to Self. You have to discover that you are not merely loving the other in order to be loved, but rather that you offer yourself to Love in every gesture, inner and outer, that is made to the other. Indeed, not only to the other, but in your whole bearing and character in every part of your life. It is to this Relationship that the marriage is submitted. And it is this that blesses the marriage.
Copyright © 2001, Richard Moss Seminars, All rights reserved.
