Life as a House

On Marriage as a Sacrament

Building a life is like building a house. The foundation matters! In my old life, before I knew God, I didn’t understand this. The secular world has stripped marriage of all meaning. It’s a cultural remnant of Biblical marriage, a sacramental ritual that has been hollowed out of purpose and filled up with temporal, ephemeral things.

When I was of the world, I thought marriage was about love as limerence, a feeling, and a government agreement with tax benefits. In my anti-Christian circles, God was absent in marriage and yet…many of us still got married. Why? I think many people who enter into it today couldn’t explain why they’re doing it if they’re doing it without God. Our modern world sells it as an expensive, “instagramable” party.

Psychologists like Emily Anhalt tell people we should change wedding vows from “till death do us part” to “as long as this feels healthy, safe, and meaningful for both of us.” It’s treated like it’s as temporary and commitment-free as dating, but with extra steps. Sterile. Void. Barren.

“Polyamory” advocates like Destiny go on podcasts to tout their “open marriages” where they treat themselves and their spouses like base animals, like whores, sexually available to anyone and everyone, but somehow, in contradiction, “special” to one another as husband and wife. How? I have followed Destiny recently talking about his wife leaving him for her boyfriend, and I sympathize with him. I would argue that whatever problems they may have had, the root problem was a lack of foundation and meaning in marriage. It’s a society-wide problem.

Is secular marriage for social status? Tax purposes? The illusion of security? What? If God’s not a part of it, what foundation is it built on? When you and your spouse, your “one flesh,” go through storms, when you have ordinary problems - much less large problems - what will you turn to for guidance? Self-help? Feminism? Social Justice? Your “love?” If your love is just surface-level, a temporal feeling of limerence, discarded when you no longer “feel like it,” what happens then?

I am talking here to my old-self, my younger self, my deluded self. I don’t know how she would have answered. Probably with some kind of feminist, liberal, humanism. Moral relativity. She could never have imagined the freedom, the peace, the sweetness, that comes with God. With boundaries. With Chesterson’s fence. With something bigger than herself, outside of herself, to turn to for guidance and structure.

The world may fall apart but I have God, the bedrock, and my husband, the brick layer (and Tiger, the decorative skirting). When behaviors or ideas or habits prove faulty and endanger the structure of the house, we can replace them, like renovating a room. But the foundation remains the same, on solid rock.

“Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.”
Matthew 7: 24-27