Signs of grace

Lutheran, The, Jun 1999 by Matthews, William R

After 54 years, our marriage has become God's sacramental gift, a taste of the feast to come

"Many have wives," Martin Luther wrote, "but few find wives ... they fail to see that their life and conduct with their wives is the work of God and pleasing in his sight." I have found a wife-Irene, the woman I married 54 years ago, who grows more precious day by day.

With her, I've learned that marriage is God's sacramental gift-a physical sign of God's gracious presence.

We were unaware of this on that April evening in 1945 as we stood in Radar Lutheran Church, Timberville, Va., before Pastor S. Wallace Berry and an altar adorned with iris and mock orange blossoms. But Irene and I were participating in a ritual first act of an ongoing, deepening sacramental experience of the blessed grace of God.

In Living Happily Ever After: Toward a Theology of Christian Marriage, Thomas N. Hart wrote:

"God reveals himself to a wife through her husband, and to a husband through his wife, and to others through them both.... One's spouse is an important channel of grace, perhaps even the most important channel of grace in one's life."

What a powerful and sobering vocation Christian marriage is-a relationship designed to show signs of God's gracious love.

The sign of memory

In marriage, shared memories become part of our current selves. As an elderly couple, we recall times when God touched and bound us more tightly together. Again we drink coffee at a sidewalk table near the Pantheon on a warm Roman January day. We find roses blooming in winter in a Paris garden. We relive an academic leave at the University of Virginia, where we lived happily in a postage-stamp apartment, where I wrote my first book, where we wandered hand in hand for miles exploring historic Charlottesville.

Last month, at the bottom of a trunk, we discovered black-and-- white photos of our first two years. We lived in a trailer on the campus of the University of Toledo in Ohio among other discharged soldiers and their young brides, many of whom were pregnant: Fertile Valley, we called the community. God lived in all these experiences-and still does in memory.

The sign of freedom

Marital freedom is the ability to choose the marriage itself, to put the good of the other first and, thus, the good of both.

During the first months of our union, Irene urged me to put the Depression-driven material dreams of the late 1940s aside to become a 25-year-old college freshman on the G.I. Bill. It meant no car, shabby clothes, rental housing, poverty in all but our sons and deepening mutual love. Professional risk-taking followed: giving up a tenured teaching position to pursue a doctorate and another to become a college vice president.

Now I look back on 45 years of fulfilled vocation, having done what I think the Lord put me on earth to do. Irene has always been there with her unique contributions. In those pre-feminist years, soldiers' brides were awarded PHT's, "putting hubby through." Today every word I write passes through her creative editorial hands.

The sign of faithfulness

God's faithfulness pervades the Old and New Testaments. "Behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age," Jesus promises. A good marriage embodies this promise.

In the wedding ceremony, we pledge fidelity, and the congregation prays to the "faithful Lord" to "give them power and patience, affection and understanding, courage and love toward you, toward each other, and toward the world, that they may continue together in mutual growth according to your will in Jesus Christ our Lord" (Lutheran Book of Worship, page 204).

To reflect God's holy love, marriage must be utterly faithful. Irene looks on with a smile as I am hugged by favorite waitresses, dental techs, nurses and young ladies at church to whom I have become a surrogate father and grandfather. With our mutual married delight, we are comfortable in our certainty of each other.

Stray? When for 54 years there is sheer you at home?

"Faithfulness," says Joyce Huggett in Two Into One, "is a voluntary donation, a free investment of one-self in the partnership. It is a promise to share your possessions, a mutual offering of body, mind and spirit for the enrichment of both partners and the relationship." The joy from faithfulness to a human couple is but a faint sign of God's delectable faithfulness to both.

The sign of children

Children are a sign of God's love for creation. Made in the Creator's image, we carry out God's initial wedding command, "Be fruitful and multiply."

Christianity has long held that among the most important goals of marriage is our gift of children to the world-our Bill's music, our Jon's writing, the fatherhood of both. From such giving we receive infinitely more. Our lives with our children, our love for them, our caring for them and helping them grow all mirror-- although dimly-God's experience with us.

The pains and joys of parenthood reflect God's pains and joys. Merely human, I could not willingly sacrifice my son for the benefit of humankind. But through our experience as parents we taste God's anguish.