Marriage as a School of Love: How our Vocations Educate and Enlighten
/DOMINIKA RAMOS
What does it mean that marriage is a school of love?
PHOTOGRAPHY: ELIZABETH M PHOTOGRAPHY
When I was engaged the phrase seemed lovely and poetic but vague to me. Maybe it was also my allergy to well-meaning but grave voices warning me that marriage was "hard work" that made me gloss over this term, "school of love."
As far as I was concerned, my fiancé was easy to love and so I assumed that marriage would be a school in the sense that my favorite subjects growing up were part of school--delightful and easy to pass.
Lo and behold, marriage actually is hard work, but rather than the drudgery those well-meaning voices made me envision, when we've integrated our hearts and minds with God's will, the work of marriage is enlivening. It's only until I was in the thick of marriage experiencing this kind of formative work that the term "school of love" took on substance and became a valuable framework for my vocation.
The following list outlines some aspects I've found helpful in thinking of my vocation in the language of education:
Everything is formation
Marriage and everything within it is not linear. You don't always progress nicely in peace and virtue and happiness.
I expected the sweetness of babies but not the accompanying anxiety, the hilarity of toddlers but not the defeating frustration. I had no conception of how fraught decisions concerning careers or family size would be.
And I never expected God would wrench away and destroy my ideas of what kind of wife and mother I would be and then simply ask me to love my children, love my spouse, and love Him more than my dreams of self.
But the periods of difficulty and the questions that have no easy answers are all meant to form me. As I stumble along struggling and feeling irritated or even desolate, I'm given, often unwittingly, the grace to grow in patience, fortitude, and trust.
Humility is a prerequisite for learning
When I taught literature I would urge my students to divest themselves of their assumptions about a work before we read it. There's no room for learning if you've already made up your mind one way or another.
The same goes for marriage.
There's no real end to how much you can learn about, understand, or love another person. So I've found it to be a best practice to approach the people God has given me in the gift of this vocation with a generous dose of gratitude and at all times to be willing to have my presuppositions upended and to grow in directions I never expected.
A good teacher can make all the difference
Over the years, my marriage mentors have included other married friends, spiritual writers, confessors, and a slew of incisive novelists.
There's nothing like someone sharing with you that they've been where you are and have lived through whatever hard thing you're going through. There's nothing like the wisdom of someone who has a strong understanding of human nature, can look at your life with an objective eye, and can lend practical advice.
This is perhaps the one bit of advice I reuse most frequently for friends who are getting married or starting families--find good mentors.
You are both a student and a teacher
This notion struck me fresh as I sat in line for confession glancing over the examination of conscience handout one day. Down the list I read the question: Have I neglected the intellectual and spiritual needs of my spouse and children?
Of course it's obvious to me that I'm supposed to be a student in this school of love, and I am aware that my husband and I are the primary teachers of our children. But something about the wording of that line imbued with extra heft the imperative to foster intellectual and spiritual growth in our home.
Moreover, it made me realize how interconnected the learning is. The more I learn to become an instrument in God's hands and the more I learn to see my spouse and children as God does, the better I can identify and attend to their spiritual and intellectual needs.
There's a line from Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses that comes back to me each time I see someone get married: "It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all." That sounds dismal, but there's a truth to it.
Seven years ago, if I could have peered into my life now I would have trembled over all the lack of sleep and difficult decisions waiting for us. I imagine if I could peer into my life seven years hence I might tremble all the more for whatever lies in wait.
But as one of my wise married friends says: "there's no grace for hypothetical situations." It's only because of the grace we've received and the formation we've undergone through these years in this school of love that makes it possible to say yes to what we are asked in this present moment and whatever will be asked of us for the rest of our lives.
