Tag: marriage

MARRIAGE: BONFIRE OF THE EGO

All major religions agree on one thing: the ego, the small self that wants everything its own way, is the biggest impediment to spiritual growth. However, marriage provides one of the best vehicles for spiritual growth, because it is all about getting your ego out of the way.  

    Our culture is very ego-based and individualistic – it is all about me and my fulfilment. But when you are married, you are no longer a single individual, you are part of something bigger than either of your egos, that is, the marriage.

    God meant for marriage to be glorious, but often it is a disaster – two egos in a power struggle over who is going to win. The ego wants everything its way, but when you are married you must negotiate everything with your spouse. The ego cannot have total control.

    Marriage experts agree there are four stages to marriage: romance, disillusionment, misery, and true, seasoned love. There are nine things that help eliminate the painful parts.

    First, wake up to the law of unity and karma. Unity means the two of you are one, and karma means what goes around comes around. Karma is a universal spiritual law found in all the great religions. Jesus said that what you give, you receive. In marriage if the two become one, whatever you do to your spouse you do to yourself. If you sow good or evil, it will come back to you. So be good to your spouse. Paul wrote that “The man who loves his wife loves himself (Ephesians 5:28).

    Secondly, marital happiness mainly lies in you, in how you choose to think about your spouse, not in your partner doing what your ego wants. Your ego will always try to make your spouse into its own personal slave. Focus on your partner’s positive not negative points.

    A third key is to accept and love your partner as they are, not as your ego wants them to be, and not as a clone of the things on your list of the ideal spouse. This list is an ego-list.

    Fourth, realize that love is a decision not a feeling. Feelings come and go and make an unstable base for marriage. Seasoned love is choosing to love your partner when you don’t feel the love. This requires maturity and work, and the ego prefers immaturity and hates work.

    Fifth, listening non-defensively is a key to communication and conflict resolution. The ego thrives on not listening, emotional drama, and blaming the other person for the problem.

    Commitment is a sixth key. The ego always wants to run away when things get hard, but disillusionment and misery are normal stages couples go through. Commitment is what gets you through misery to seasoned love. Mind you, you have to make a careful discernment here. If there is severe or prolonged verbal, emotional, sexual, or physical abuse or neglect, this is not God’s will. God probably wants you to get out.

    Humility is a seventh key. To accept you are not perfect and humbly listen to your spouse’s complaints takes a lot of self-discipline. Humility gets rid of the defensiveness, anger, self-righteousness, mind-games, blaming, judging, self-pity, and victimhood the ego loves.

    Prayer is an eighth essential. Marriage can be extremely challenging. It always helps to call upon the wisdom, power, strength, and love of God to handle times of misery.

    A ninth and final key is to realize the purpose of marriage is not sexual or financial fulfilment, but rather to grow spiritually together. According to scripture, you are both made in God’s image. So, the closest you get to God in the flesh is your marriage partner. The way you treat your spouse is the way you treat God.

    Your marriage can be part of your spiritual practice, that is, an opportunity to grow in unconditional love, humility, acceptance, listening, commitment, gratitude, unity, and prayer.

    Marriage may take you through hell, but if you keep getting your ego out of the way you will eventually get through crucifixion to resurrection, to heaven, and to true love.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and religious educator of adults. brucetallman.com  

 

 

DIVINE FEMININE/SACRED MASCULINE

 

Henri Nouwen was one-of-a-kind:

simple yet not simplistic/

deep in sentiment yet not sentimental/

self-revealing yet not exhibitionistic/

deeply personal yet universal/

sensitive to human weakness yet challenging.

 

Meister Eckhart was another great Christian expositor

who integrated heart/mind/feminine/masculine

and distinguished between ‘book learning’ and ‘life learning’ –

often an author’s life does not match their writing

but Eckhart walked his talk

and both his writing and his life

disclose God’s Truth to us.

 

Christians need to integrate their main value of love

particularly in marriage, a beautiful institution

that often gets overwhelmed

by ego/divorce/money/self-centeredness/lust/workaholism

and a culture that worships hedonism –

the pursuit of pleasure at all costs –

love without commitment or accountability –

calling it ‘free love’ or ‘polyamory.’

 

Everyone, but particularly married couples

need training in non-violence – a tactic of love

that seeks the salvation/redemption of one’s enemy/opponent

not their humiliation/defeat/destruction.

 

Everything, all personal relationships and cultural institutions

require a healthy balance of yin/yang/feminine/masculine –

after all, what good is a return to the Divine Feminine

if men refuse her because there is no return

to the Sacred Masculine?

 

But Henri Nouwen and Meister Eckhart are lamps

who can light our pathway to integration

and True Love – the marriage of the Feminine and Masculine.

FALLING (SUPER-SPIRITUAL) STARS

Many people have a multi-faith identity:

Catholic/Protestant; Buddhist/Jewish;

Baptist/Episcopalian; Christian/Hindu.

 

People are called in many different ways

but if you refuse God’s call

you turn the adventure/your true life

into meaningless boredom/a wasteland/

death.

 

Our only true greatness lies in

the humility of living faithfully.

The purer our faith, the closer we come to God.

The one who desires to exalt herself/himself

with extraordinary sexual or mystical experiences

becomes less/not more in the eyes of God.

 

If you can abandon all desire 

for the fruits of your actions/results

you can perform freely/without attachment

your duty – to love.

 

One’s duty may be to be a good spouse –

the intimate partnership of married life and love

has been established by the Creator

and is defined/qualified/bounded

by the Creator’s laws/thou-shalt-nots –

THOU SHALT NOT: lie/steal/covet thy neighbour’s

wife/husband/commit adultery.

 

Like Ravi Zacharias, Jean Vanier was a super-saint –

his work with the developmentally delayed

in L’Arche/the Ark became world-wide

group homes for those rejected by society

and his book Becoming Human

helped us discover our common humanity

the journey from loneliness to belonging

and to a love that includes all –

people of multiple faiths and no faith

people able/differently abled/disabled –

Vanier was a saint until the MeTooMovement

caught him with his pants down

with multiple women. Another spiritual superstar

had fallen – to everyone’s utter dismay.

DIVESTING DOMINANT PARADIGMS

Gospel love means divesting oneself for God

of all that is not God – all earthly attachments –

particularly to the self, but even to the Church.

 

Conservative Christians believe the Church

is the Kingdom of God in the world.

Liberal Christians believe the Queendom/Kingdom of God

is to be built outside the Church in the World.

However, one needs humility and detachment to see

that both are transient. The Church and the World are not God.

If one arrogantly makes the Church or the World eternal

one ends in idolatry. Like everything, the Church and the World

had a beginning and so will have an end.

 

Theology is an attempt to integrate God/Church/World

without reducing one to the others.

When theologians stop asking questions

and start making dogmatic statements

the spiritual search ends.

 

Artists can break through the captivity

of our dominant paradigm – idolatry

by exposing the dysfunction/pain/terror

covered up and denied.

Then healing may begin.

 

A similar dominant paradigm is insularism –

self-protection, like idolatry, takes many forms:

individualism (me first)

tribalism (my family or tribe first)

nationalism (my country before other countries/the planet)

historicism (ignoring human history – 1000s of years

or the history of the universe – billions of years).

Insularism loves sexism/racism/ageism/ablism –

people with disabilities are often terribly lonely

and show us our own loneliness

and how we all have a deep need to break out of insularism

and find community/friends/love.

 

A Christian woman and man, who thru the marriage covenant

of conjugal love are one flesh, render mutual service

to one another through this intimate union

and show us how the Church and the World ought to be –

united in Christ and reaching out to help everyone.

INTEGRATING MATTER/SHADOW/LOVE

The Second Axial Period

(after the First: from 800 to 200 BCE)

developed from the Protestant Reformation to now

(the shift from religion to science)

and is gradually becoming global/communal/ecological/cosmic

and challenging religions to integrate

matter/spirit/secular energy/sacred energy

into one complete human energy.

Wilber’s Four Quadrants accomplish this by including

– self and consciousness (“I:” upper left quadrant)

– brain and neocortex (“It:” upper right)

– culture and worldview (“We:” lower left)

– social systems and environment (“Its:” lower right).

Wilber later concluded even this was incomplete

and the dark side of things needed to be included

so he added “shadow” –

shadow only seems bad because it contains

all the parts of me that society does not accept –

but shadow is in fact a treasure buried in a field

because it also paradoxically contains everything

that can make us whole/holy.

Therefore, if someone asks

“What kind of Christian are you?”

the most honest answer is “A bad one but

I am on a pilgrimage with God

as my guide and destination.”

One of the manifestations of shadow is loneliness

which is essential to human experience –

papered over with busyness/success/money

but never eliminated because

nothing earthly can satisfy the longing of the heart

not even married love because

loneliness is ultimately longing for God.

Authentic married love overcomes loneliness

if caught up into Divine Love

and governed and enriched

by Christ’s redeeming power.

Authentic joining of self/spouse/world/God

unites spirit/matter/secular/sacred.

COMING FULL-CIRCLE WITH GOD

Teilhard de Chardin wrote that evolution

is a process of convergence

in which new qualitative differences spontaneously emerge

as matter intrinsically evolves from matter toward spirit.

Qualitatively new things emerged

after the fall of the Roman Empire –

the Church unified all things

and preserved civilization from Barbarians.

For centuries civilization fared well under church rule

until the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Then, because of intrareligious wars – Catholics and Protestants

slaughtering each other

and previous interreligious wars – crusading Christians and Muslims

slaughtering each other

the Big Four – science/art/ethics/religion

did not progress together – religion was ridiculed as inherently violent

and left out of the progression to modernity.

But eventually new gods emerged:

divine authority lost control

to the self-determining individual who –

even as ‘master of the universe’ –

found he could not bear the weight of the whole

and so surrendered personal autonomy to the new gods:

science/technology/power/money/violence

and the whole world was at war – twice!

The new gods led many to doubt God.

On the road to total doubt

one tries to keep one’s spiritual life alive

by clinging to traditions and convictions.

But if doubt continues one jettisons traditional religion

without surrendering one’s convictions

and carries on until total doubt/despair of truth

takes over and in a post-truth society

you lose your religion entirely:

in post-Christian countries people are

spiritual-but-not-religious.

In the post-religion/post-truth world

you can still grow spiritually

if you open your heart and mind

to the constantly changing nature

of yourself and reality

which creates never-ending loss/grief/struggle

and a capacity for compassion

love for others and the desire to not water

the seeds of prejudice and aggression.

It is true the old Gods were genuinely giving –

the Father gave his only Son

and Son Jesus gave us his life/death/resurrection.

Therefore, the post-religious need constant analysis

of their motives for giving

because spurious altruism may be egocentric

with hidden unconscious motives for

attention/power/security/praise.

Through pure spirituality people often find God

despite living in a post-God culture.

For Bernard Lonergan conversion of heart and mind

reaches its climax with ‘religious conversion:’

‘being-in-love with Being’

which is the foundation of mystical theology.

Lonergan agrees with Thomas à Kempis:

the Imitation of Christ has one exclusive purpose:

to guide us to a deeper love of Jesus for his own sake

not for desire for heaven or fear of hell.

Being-in-love is being-in-God/union-with-God –

Sacred Marriage – which has been central

to initiation rites in all religions because in it

sacred masculine knowledge (Logos) is united with

sacred feminine relatedness (Eros).

Faith in God understood non-dualistically

as union-with-God/divinization is not

blind assent or even reasoned assent

but rather the subtle work of the Holy Spirit

within our hearts and minds.

And so we eventually come full circle:

faith/loss of faith/doubt

leads to despair/spirituality/conversion –

the love of God at a deeper, broader level –

unity/union-with-God/Sacred Marriage.

12 MARRIAGE TIPS

  1. Assume your partner has good intentions towards you.

2.  Love is perseverance and commitment more than a feeling.

3.  Accept your partner for who they are rather than who you want them to be. Don’t try to change them.

4.  You and your partner are one. Whatever you do to your partner, you indirectly do to yourself.

5.  Marriage is in the ordinariness of everyday life, not constant romance.

6.  You choose each day that you want to be in this relationship.

7.  Choose to see frustrating things about your partner as an opportunity for you to develop kindness, patience, and forgiveness.

8.  Remember why you fell in love with your partner in the first place.

9.  Every relationship experiences difficulties. Successful relationships hang in there through the hard times.

10. Remember that you’re not perfect either.

11. Focus on the good qualities in each other.

12. Have realistic expectations about marriage, yourself and your partner.

http://www.brucetallman.com Facebook: “Bruce Tallman – Spiritual Director and Marriage Coach” email: btallman@rogers.com