by Alice Mulford
In my family, it’s been more or less understood that we shouldn’t marry someone whose religious understandings differ greatly from ours. This means I should probably marry a nice Methodist boy.
For a long time, I didn’t understand why my parents made such a big deal about it. Love is love, and if I’m meant to be with, oh, I don’t know, an atheist, then so be it, right?
A couple winters ago, I finally understood what my parents were getting at. I was outside with my then-boyfriend, who I think was a fan of chaos theory. We were marveling at the glory of a winter’s day.
“This is so beautiful,” I whispered. “God is so amazing.”
The boy disagreed in his own way, talking about the science behind everything.
Something inside of me snapped. It was too late to remain calm and enjoy the moment.
“This is beautiful to me because my God made it,” I explained to him. “And it’s beautiful to you because… what? Because it was an accident?”
“Yes,” he said.
In that moment, I realized that he and I could no longer be together, because I knew that he was sitting there guarding this thought that I was a complete idiot, and I was standing there staring at him in disbelief, appalled that he would never reach the understanding I had come to.
Another time and another sweetheart who wasn’t of my faith, I made him confess that he sometimes thought to himself, “Alice is so smart. How can she believe this?”
How could you spend the rest of your life with someone who thought that your religion was your greatest shortcoming?
A person should marry someone whose religious thoughts are in the same place as yours. For me, this means that I will be with a man who is a strong Christian, and who will, among other things, pray with me. If you marry within your religion, you find support, strength. You get spiritual backup, which is important.
In Paul’s letters (found in the Bible), he describes marriage as a gift. You don’t just get a marriage because you want one or because you think you deserve it. God blesses you with a partner if He so chooses.
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1 comment:
Strange, reading that conversation out of context I would have been touched that two people, having such differing beliefs on the same subject, could be sitting there witnessing the same event where one believes that God created this unique moment, while the other believes that through the hundreds of millions of incalculable events that could have occured, this one, with these two people, seeing the same beautiful winter night had occured at that moment, even outside of something divine, would have been rather inspiring to me.
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