28 Years of Marriage (Part 2)

Because there's more to say about having and holding, forgiving and forgetting

I didn’t honestly plan to write two posts on marriage this month. I can’t honestly say I do a lot of content planning for these letters, which is something I’d like to amend (and probably won’t). But starting in June at least, as I celebrate 10 years of my first book, Teach Us to Want, I’ll run a series of posts on desire in the context of faith. I’m looking forward to asking myself: 10 years beyond what I wrote in those pages, what would I revise or add, even renounce? Stay tuned.

Having no intention to write a second post on marriage, it did strike me, after reading some comments and reader emails from last week’s letter, that I have more things to say, especially on the subject of forgiving and forgetting. Because where would Ryan and I be, after 28 years of marriage, without the severe mercy of forgiving and forgetting? Where would we be if we had no vision for the goodness of sin forgiven, cast to the bottom of the sea, removed as far as the east is from the west? Where would we be without the call to “believe all things, hope all things, bear all things, endure all things?” Aren’t we people of the cross, who believe God nailed the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands and canceled it (cf. Col. 2:14)? Aren’t we people who have been taught by Jesus to relate the forgiveness we would seek from God to the forgiveness we must grant to our neighbor?

It is awfully hard to cling to record-keeping when you hope God clings to erasure.

I will admit that in our marriage, we may have had an easier time of it than those who have discovered betrayals that wound beyond repair. I will state firmly that there are good reasons for divorce, even if divorce is a terrible trauma. If God hates divorce (and he does), I think his hatred must act like a burning grief that a marriage, meant to illustrate his eternally steadfast and faithful love for his people, has failed its sacramental task, has left people wondering where in the world they are safe and received. A broken marriage is an open wound, and children of divorced parents seem to know this in their bones.

This is not a post to celebrate that after 28 years, Ryan and I have done something right. It is certainly not a post to point fingers at those whose marriages have not held. Rather, it’s a post to suggest that holding gets hard for all of us. It’s a post to suggest that forgiving and forgetting will be necessary, and everything in you will feel affronted by that necessity.

One reason for our abhorrence of forgiveness (and its forgetfulness) is this: in our cultural moment, we see these acts, not simply as naïve, but as dangerous. If someone is forgiven, if a wrong is forgotten, we’re told that justice has not been served. Justice, in the contemporary picture, is served by careful ledgers and heavy books. Justice is served when we speak the truth to power. Justice is served when we hold to account. Justice is served by long, untiring, unflagging memory. Justice is served when we file away dusty records of offense and retrieve them at a moment’s notice—as any good investigative journalist would. Every piece of evidence must be tagged and numbered and shelved because when this case comes to trial, you’re going to need them all.

To be clear, justice is a God-given good, and it is right to name what is wrong and seek to repair it. According to the Psalmist, the trees of the field clap their hands when God’s justice is done and evildoers get their due. I believe this firmly and have written in many different places about reparative justice and its commitment to truth-telling. (See my 2020 article on telling the truth about American history and repairing some of our national wounds.) But here’s another gospel truth, one that might make us squirm a little more today, and it’s that love covers a multitude of sins. It’s that love forgives and forgets, which is to say that love deliberately decides, at least some of the time, against the rehearsal of wrong-doing. This rehearsal of fault is laid down, not because one has been cowed into silence, but because one hopes for a different future, because one is creating space for a better future to take shape.

Yes, just as last week’s post confronted the false binary between self and marriage, this week’s post confronts the false binary between justice and mercy. In the kingdom of God, hese aren’t either-ors, but both-ands (and it just so happens I wrote a whole book about others tensions we maintain in the Christian life. See Surprised by Paradox.)

Is that naïve? To embrace a practice of forgiving, even forgetting? In marriage, I myself have wondered a thousand times, though I can’t see my way beyond the foolhardiness of God, whose tender mercy and patient love has all the scandal of a disgraced father throwing a party for his prodigal son. If we have never considered the risk of forgiveness, the great cost of forgiveness, then perhaps we have never truly forgiven.

Here's the thing in marriage: you forgive and forget a wrong (or your partner forgives and forgets your wrong), and you invariably wound again. It’s the tragic story of being human, which none has captured better than the apostle Paul when he said we do the evil we hate and fail the good we love. You commit these crimes, not against abstract principles, but against people you love. This is the sober realism of Romans 7.

I wish that the arc of marriage were not frustrating cycles of stuckness—but wanting for change, even willing for change, doesn’t work like magic. A good marriage requires a lifetime: of owning the debilitating deformities of the story you inherited as a child and the ways you run skittish and spooked from love. Marriage takes the work of learning to speak hard truths gently and hopefully—and learning when those god-honest truths are best left unsaid because you are not the Holy Spirit after all.

Marriage, my friends, is so much waiting, which is why I ask God to help me and Ryan remain patient with the slowness of our individual transformation and the transformation of our marriage. If I say that we have been at this work for 28 years, I want you to imagine it’s the work of the farmer in all the seasons of the year: the tilling, the planting, the watering, the waiting. Yes, waiting is a part of the harvest, and you can’t wait hopefully unless at some point you surrender the way you’ve been telling the story.

At the end of Purgatorio in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante the pilgrim must cross two rivers before he can enter Paradise. These rivers are not fed by rain; they have a “sure, unchanging source” in God.^[1] First, Dante must cross the river Lethe, whose waters will cleanse him from the memory of sin. It’s not the memory of being sinned against that Dante must forget—but the memory of having himself wounded others. Then, the pilgrim must cross the river Eunoe, and what will be restored to him is the remembrance of all good deeds, presumably his own. Memory must be baptized, and this is the final act of purgation for the pilgrim to undergo.

In the waters of Lethe, Dante finds his own reflection, and it causes him to wince in remorse, “such shame weighed on my brow.”^[2] Beatrice, the love of his life whom he has been seeking and who will now guide him into Paradise, reads the record of Dante’s earthly unfaithfulness: “He set his steps upon an untrue way, pursuing those images of good that bring no promise to fulfillment.”^[3] Her words pierce like swords, and Dante is brought to proper penitence, shedding tears that evidence his deep and sincere regret. But this isn’t enough, for his must agree to the account Beatrice gives. He must confess. His voice fails him, but he manages to croak a yes of guilt—and then he is plunged into the river, forced to swallow the sweetness of its water.

Sin is forgotten. This much is clear when Dante reaches the banks of the River Eunoe. But a second baptism is required, however. As Lethe had been a death, Eunoe would be a resurrection, reviving powers “that are dead in him.” Those powers are recollection, of course. Those powers are memory. But this time, after he tastes these waters, it won’t be rehearsal of wrong that will occupy his mind. No, his mind will be renewed to tell a different story.

“If reader, I had more ample space to write,

I should sing at least in part the sweetness

Of the drink that never would have sated me.

But, since all the sheets

Made ready for this second canticle are full,

The curb of art lets me proceed no farther.

From those most holy waters

I came away remade, as are new plants

Renewed with new-sprung leaves,

Pure and prepared to rise up to the stars.”^[4]

What forgiving—and forgetting—allows for in our friendships and families and marriages and churches is what Dante has so beautifully figured here, that the person plunged into the waters of baptism is not the same person who emerges. And it’s not simply that they are different but that we can imagine them to be different.

There are truths to tell in marriage, as in all relationships. And there is also much to forget. We remember and forgive, we forgive and forget—and it is all made possible because we are taken up daily in the compassionate arms of a Father whose memory, according to Psalm 103, is both long and short.

Short, because sin is both forgiven and removed.

Long, because he remembers that we are dust.

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^[1] XXVIII, l. 124

^[2] XXX, l. 78

^[3] XXX, l. 130-132

^[4] XXXIII, l. 136-145