Among the persons I have counseled, one fellow made a statement that no other ever made. He was obviously lonely, was a gracious and handsome fellow, high-minded in his interests, but was becoming reclusive to the degree that he was exacerbating his loneliness. I asked why he had never married. I never married, he said, because I always felt that I could not bear the loss of that person when she died, if she died before I did. I responded in my own way then, as Joy Davidman responded in Shadowlands, a biographical version of the life of C. S. Lewis: The pain then is part of the pleasure now. That’s the deal. Lewis and Davidman were married late in Lewis’s life.
On this date in 1943, I married Fern A. Erway in Oakland, California. World War II was at its height in Europe and the Pacific. Everything in life reminded the citizenry at home that there was a war on. For a few days I virtually forgot about the world and warfare. I was in a conscious trance, claiming my bride. We were married and spent a few days honeymooning in her beloved Santa Cruz Mountains, at Mount Hermon, where many years later I often spoke at conferences, to her delight. Nearly sixty years after our marriage, she died. We had reared four children, completed my formal education through a doctoral program, saw grandchildren. At the time of her death, we had six great grandchildren – and counting. (There are eighteen now.) The flow of cards I received after her death commonly made reference to her, and to our marriage. Other experiences and achievements for either of us were not emphasized, but the impact of our irrevocable, intimate, spiritual, and happy marriage was often repeated in personal remarks.
How could two persons, so different from each other, have so loving, so fulfilling, so accepting, so problem-solving, so example-setting a marriage? Neither of us took credit for it, except to pat ourselves on the back for accepting the model that made the difference between a lasting marriage and dissolution. I do not say divorce, because many marriages, in which the two parties stay together, are dissolved in reality. I have counseled many such couples, and have seen many more, in the course of everyday experience. Divorce is not the only civil way to dissolve a marriage.
Several years passed during which we worked through what nearly all couples go through – in tensions, misunderstandings, withdrawals, distractions. Then we agreed on the Biblical model for marriage, the model in which the husband plays out the Christ role in his family and the wife plays out the Church role in the family. It is all prescribed by the Apostle Paul in the latter part of the fifth Chapter of Ephesians. The adoption and the serious application of the model became a miracle for us. By taking the acceptance, patience, love, creativity, and a dozen or so other attributes of the spiritual application of Christ/Church; to the husband/wife relationship we discovered something so wonderful that neither of us wanted to dilute it. It became a model that not only formed our marriage, but fostered spiritual growth in us as well. As the Apostle implied, it is a mystery, a practical one to be lived. We did it. I believe the pattern, the model, is supreme of all marriage analogies. We need to remember that Christ and the Scripture used the parable as the teaching method (pedagogical) to freight meaning and life in experience. Even those who would be unable to form a logical syllogism can understand all that is necessary to good life, to happy and effective family. Daily experience can be found in God’s stories, the parables of Scripture. None is more important to us for natural life than the family illustration of solidarity and love found in the ideal of the relationship of Christ and the Church. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020