I’ve been fleshing out the idea of becoming truly myself. The person I am, who God made me to be, reaching my full potential. How do I do that when the world tells me to be someone else? (I think about the Cure song “why can’t I be you?") When my wounds and fears teach me to be someone else to avoid getting hurt?
The craziness that I came up with is community (also read relationships)…here’s why it’s crazy. It’s others who tell us who we should be. Though rejection and conformity we learn who we should be and how to hide who we really are. The paradox is in community we also learn to expose the venerable parts of ourselves to acceptance and love. When we don’t receive rejection we no longer feel the need to hide. So we start emerging, carefully at first then no longer hindered by who we think we should be, we come completely out of our shell. Fully visiable completely exposed to someone else we truly see ourselves for the first time, or at least for the first time in a long time.
A couple of days ago I ran across this description of Marriage from Buechner. The ending was completely unexpected but I agree with it wholeheartedly. I also love that he describes the promises a man and a woman make to each other in marriage as rash and quixotic (look it up, it’s a perfect description).
Marriage:
They say they will love comfort, honor each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when the feel like it but even--for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health--when they don't feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they made at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other's burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?
They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they're lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and a patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get thought the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don't have children, they become the other's child.
They both still have their lives apart as well as a love together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water in to wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.
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