In a very funny piece written a number of years ago, the late Erma Bombeck (she died in 1996), announced that with the possible exception of “We have lift off,” or “This country is at war,” there will never be another sentence in the language as sobering as, “I now pronounce you man and wife!”
For far too many of us, however, we are not nearly sobered enough. Certainly not the newly married, who, moving through a thick honeymoon haze, too often haven’t a clue as to the meaning of the marriage they’ve just begun.
Is it perhaps because, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”? Or is it the fact that, like the soil of a nation’s literature requiring a great deal of history in which to grow, it takes an awful lot of experience to harvest even a little wisdom? And wisdom, well, it is not a dish one ordinarily finds on the buffet table following the ceremony.
Indeed, to cite Mr. Eliot one more time, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
But this much I do know—that when it comes to marriage, to the happy outcome of the match, it will not matter a whit how radiant the bride looked, nor how handsome the groom. Because, at the margin, marriage is a matter of two people having an experience whose meaning and impact they will need a lifetime to absorb and distill. Until, that is, painfully repeated failure succeeds at last in conferring a kind of wisdom, to wit, the wisdom of agony.
Yet we neither repine nor despair.
Because sanctity, which is the holiness of life that all of us are meant to look for in the marital state, will invariably be found in the struggle to obtain it; which, to succeed, must last as long as the marriage itself. Such perfection, in other words, decisively depends on how resolute we remain, under the Mercy, to pick ourselves up and soldier bravely on.
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