Process Patience

Mark 10: 2-16

2 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ 3He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ 4They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ 5But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” 7“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’
10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’
13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ 16And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

And the two shall become one…and then they shall spend the next 20 years deciding which one.

This week’s theme presents an ideal of the sacredness of marriage and family but, as always, where there is an ideal there is also brokenness and struggle. It’s the human condition. The mystery of God taking two separate people and making them one flesh is something that has mystified and challenged couples since Adam and Eve. If all couples that have made a vow before God to love, honor and cherish each other have indeed been made into one flesh, why is the flesh so obviously at war with itself day after day?

It is a mystery which we can mull over often, sometimes in frustration and resentment, sometimes in deep sadness and sometimes just in real confusion that, for the most part, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistent evidence of true oneness in relationships. Marriage is an incredibly difficult journey of give and take and one would think that if there really were just one flesh, everything would be wonderfully unified. Life decisions would be easy and there would always be a great sense of mutual support, respect and appreciation. Disagreements would be rare and arguments unheard of.

“If we have actually been made into one flesh then he would always agree with me.”

There’s the crunch, the crossroads and crisis point. I don’t think anyone, male or female, goes into a marriage having thought through the idea that if two people become one flesh, how do they actually live and move as one instead of two different people always duking it out as to whose flesh gets to be more in control in every situation that comes along? There doesn’t seem to be a single good or easy answer to that question.

Perhaps it’s the wrong question.

We tend to take a divine mystery and look at it from a human point of view, our own point of view. But there’s another point of view: God’s. What is it that God sees when he looks at two people who have committed themselves to the sacred vocation of marriage and raising a family?

We have friends who make their own wine. I have never made wine myself but I at least know that it starts with some fruit to which water, yeast and a few other ingredients are added and it goes through quite a process before it becomes wine worthy of consumption. It goes through fermentation, clarification, siphoning, aging and mellowing. The ingredients are given time to interact with each other and great care is taken that bacteria is not introduced because bacteria can infect the wine and turn it to vinegar. Our friends love to make wine. They may start out with a bunch of individual ingredients that would seem to a neophyte to have little potential but experienced winemakers envision a finished product that will give them great pleasure.

God is the master winemaker. He makes the Wine of One Body. Before two people even meet and marry, God sees the finished product. He knows there is a long and sometimes painful process these two people must go through before they become a delightfully full flavored One Body Wine, but that in no way diminishes his pleasure in what he is making.

So the challenges, struggles, discouragement and frustration, as well as the times of mutual joy, love and shared vision are all critical to what God is creating. We are holy ingredients going through difficult times of cleansing, fermentation, clarification and aging. Our part in all of this is to be full of hope and grateful that we are indeed being taken carefully and lovingly through a necessary process. We do have a responsibility to guard this process against the bacteria that can turn the wine into vinegar. This bacteria can take the form of built up resentments, territorialism, aggression, defensiveness, withdrawal…there are too many things to list but no one needs to be told the whole list of negative things that destroy relationship.

Accepting that there is a process going on won’t necessarily make it easy but it can relieve some anxiety and guilt. The whole spiritual life is a wine making process and no matter how committed we are to being the best we can be as Christians, we still need to go through the process. I have noticed in my life that whenever something happens that makes me exclaim, “God is so good! Thank you, Lord”, it always happens after a long period of struggle where day after day my thoughts, emotions, desires and directions are purified, decanted and distilled. I have noticed that waiting is almost a built in requisite to seeing God’s will come to pass and usually his will is completely different from what I initially thought it was. To me, his will looked like some grapes, some sugar and a bit of yeast. It never even occurred to me that his will could turn out to be the exquisite wine I end up delighting in.

A pregnant woman would probably relate better to a metaphor of the child growing and developing in the womb. The mother can lovingly envision the child who is being created within. She cannot see all the processes of development going on and she is aware that there is and will be great discomfort involved in carrying and delivering this child. She knows that no matter how impatient she feels and no matter how uncomfortable she is physically, the child will be born when it’s time for him or her to be born. She is filled with the delightful mystery that this child, created from two separate entities will be an entirely different being from her and her husband.

We live lives filled with the holy and sacred process of creation whether it is the creation of the one body or the creation of a child or the creation of a deeper and fuller spiritual oneness with the Lord. All of life is fermentation, clarification and aging.

As St. Paul wrote in Romans 8: 22-25:

For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this (creation), but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our body. For we were saved with this hope in mind. Now a hope that can be observed is not really hope, for who hopes for what can be seen? But if we hope for what we do not yet observe, we eagerly wait for it with patience.

So, groan away…and be joyful. All creation groans with you.