When marriage is seen as a spiritual path, it expands our ability to love, benefiting more than just two partners. It may serve as a nurturing environment for children. Or it may offer one or both partners the support needed to perform socially beneficial work. Marriage may enable two people to consciously nurture each other's life and growth, so all they do is enhanced by their relationship. In this way, marriage enables them individually and as a couple to give more to the world around them.

While in her twenties, quiet and down-to-earth Judy considered living a single life of service to God, feeling that family life and a life of service were incompatible. Now married four years, she sees how her marriage to Michael enables her to serve God in ways she might not have attempted if she were single, such as becoming a long-term foster parent. Referring to their seven-year-old foster son, Judy reflects, "Taking Romanze down to the park to play, or up and down the street roller-skating, having fun with him, is helping the world, but it doesn't look that way. It's not what I had pictured before as helping the world. But if you're really going to be a parent and really be serious about it, that's what you're doing."

Patricia, who leads couples enrichment workshops with her husband, Brad, is enthusiastic about the ways her own marriage has helped her flourish. Now in her mid-forties, Patricia's dark eyes sparkle as she states: "At every turn I can think of when there was something I wanted to do or try or work through, Brad's position was, ?Go for it! You can do it.' So I have felt throughout my marriage, which is now almost twenty-three years, that I've been empowered by it." Patricia notes that she and Brad have not confined themselves to rigid gender roles. "We've easily passed back and forth who's the primary breadwinner," she explains. "In 1978, for him to stay home and take care of our infant daughter while I went back to work was something we had to continually give one another permission for because the permission wasn't there in the culture."

Their marriage also includes the freedom to follow their individual spiritual journeys at separate paces. Although spirituality was important to Patricia from the beginning of their marriage, it was not central to Brad. Patricia states, "We were married thirteen or fourteen years when some things happened for him that fostered his spiritual development, and now that's something that is much more shared by the two of us." She is delighted by this change in him but recognizes that he had to make this journey at his own pace.

Patricia and Brad do not seek "meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy" in each other. Instead they seek support for a lifetime of searching. This distinction allows a healthy space in their marriage, enabling each of them to deepen the individual process of self-discovery which in turn nurtures their togetherness. Space allows partners to see themselves and each other more clearly. Space enables them to confront their own incompleteness. Space leaves room for each one's individual connection to God. Ironically, it is only in our individuality that we can really experience union with others or the Divine. If we attempt to suppress our uniqueness in the name of partnership, we will stunt the relationship as well as ourselves.

When we see marriage as a spiritual path, our partner's uniqueness can teach us important life lessons. Accepting our lover's vulnerabilities can teach us compassion. Respecting another's rhythms can teach us patience. Understanding another way of thinking can broaden our perspective. The inevitable differences between two people will cause friction, but if we are open, honest, and committed to the struggle, the friction can polish us, as two gems in a tumbler polish each other.

Marcia, a Reconstructionist rabbi in her mid-forties, has studied both scripture and psychology. Speaking in the measured tone of a teacher, she offers a description of marriage that integrates the ancient understanding of her tradition with the insights of modern psychology. "For me, being partnered is a context for the evolution of my own spiritual growth," she states. "But even more than that, it is itself a spiritual practice." She explains that in Judaism, marriage is considered an important mitzvah, a spiritual imperative that brings people closer to God, like keeping the Sabbath and learning Torah.

Rabbi Marcia explains that marriage is one of the metaphors through which the Jewish people conceptualize their relationship with God: "We bind ourselves to a certain caliber of dynamic and intimate relationship with God that is one of love, and, as in a marriage, also sometimes one of wrestling. Like in a marriage, there is give and take and even sometimes struggle." Rabbi Marcia relates this to the name Israel, pronounced Yisra'el in Hebrew, which means "God-wrestler." This was the name earned by the patriarch Jacob, who wrestled with an angel of God and prevailed. "When we called our people Yisra'el, the "God-wrestlers," we recognized the implications. We wrestle with God with the intimacy of lovers. So too, we observe that in our most personal loving relationships we can experience a most profound God-wrestling. In the intimacy of partnered life, we experience a reflection of our relationship with God."

Marcia says of her own marriage, "I'm thrilled to be in a partnership, and I am thrilled with my partner. We love and wrestle a lot. We complement each other. We support each other. We challenge each other's edges, even in the times of friction. We are each stretched in our encounter with each other's unique perspective. In that encounter, which is framed by love and commitment, there is safety and risk in a tango. For myself, my marriage is an opportunity to grow spiritually and emotionally. I become more."

Being in a heterosexual relationship, Marcia explains, offers the particular opportunity to experience life from a different gender vantage point. She says, "For me as a woman, there is something about maleness that is radically ?other.' I find myself continually challenged to expand my awareness, to embrace the other. This can be at once completing, fulfilling, and mind-boggling." Marcia points out that "maleness" and "femaleness" are also part of each individual, just as both aspects are part of God. "It is exciting to support the feminine dimension within my spouse through my being, as he supports the masculine dimension in me through his being. In this relationship, I feel partnered in a complete and fulfilling way. Perhaps this is why in the Torah, we hear God calling us as individuals not to be alone, but to be in partnership."

Rabbi Marcia points out, however, that holy partnering is not exclusive to heterosexual relationships: "Jewish tradition teaches that Kedusha, holiness, is found within marriage, but in a growing sector of the Jewish community there is increasing acknowledgment that the sacred can be expressed in all committed, loving relationships, including same-sex unions."

Rabbi Marcia's description blends religious and psychological understandings of marriage. The sacredness of human partnership is emphasized by comparing the marriage of two people with the marriage between God and God's people. By wrestling with each other, the couple experiences God-wrestling as well. By locating and honoring each one's feminine and masculine aspects, they more fully reflect the feminine and masculine aspects of the Divine, individually and as a couple.

The wrestling image also illustrates Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's description of marriage as a psychological relationship. Jung asserted that by struggling with each other, two people could discover unconscious aspects of themselves. By integrating their shadow sides and the feminine and masculine energies within each of them, each person could become more conscious, more in touch with their true self. While Jung believed this type of growth was the goal of a mature relationship, he acknowledged that most marriages never reached it, focusing instead on the preservation of the species.

With the consumer view of love, we marry for what we'll get out of it. We may even see psychological growth as something that is for our own benefit, or the mutual benefit of both partners. But when marriage is seen as a spiritual path, it transcends the two people involved. We are not just wrestling each other; we are also wrestling the Divine. Roman Catholics describe marriage as a sacrament to convey that the sacred is present in the joining of two partners. Marriage is a channel of grace, a way of experiencing God's love. In Called: New Thinking on Christian Vocation, Roman Catholic monk M. Basil Pennington writes, "The human heart wants an infinite love. If the marriage partners seek this in each other they are bound to be disappointed and frustrated." Only if they help each other seek God's love, "then their aspiration for infinite love can be fulfilled and in that love their mutual love can be limitless." In this understanding, growth through marriage is a way for two people to experience God.

Many cultures have seen the sexual aspect of marriage as a special experience of transcendence. In Tantric Yoga, sexual pleasure is said to release kundalini, the sacred energy which enables lovers to feel one with the Divine. In Taoism, sex is seen as a way to balance yin and yang, the feminine and masculine energies of the universe, and Taoist men are taught that giving their female partners pleasure is itself a spiritual practice. Although the Judeo-Christian tradition has emphasized the procreative potential of sex-with Christian churches often portraying sex as an obstacle to spiritual growth-both Judaism and Christianity have also taught that sex can be an expression of holiness, uniting physical and spiritual experience.

What all these perspectives have in common is the belief that sexual relationship is a path, not a destination; it is an expression of love and holiness, not a god in and of itself. This view need not devalue the strength of desire, the joy of pleasure, the human need for sexual bonding. Seeing the sacred dimension of sex actually gives it more value than the books and magazine articles that focus exclusively on technique, as if mastering a new sexual skill will make sex meaningful. Unlike the technical approaches that separate sex from soul, most spiritual traditions teach that sex reaches its sacred potential in the context of an ongoing relationship where partners give their whole selves to each other, not just their bodies.

Although the major religions have generally defined such relationships as heterosexual, there is now a small but growing segment of the religious world that also recognizes gay partnership as a potential path to transcendence. This comes from the recognition that God calls people to different forms of loving. For some, heterosexual marriage is the spiritual path that will help them grow toward God. For others, gay partnership is such a path. Still others feel called to a life of singleness or even solitude. To love most fully, it is important that we discover the form of loving meant for us.

The process of discovering our path is itself full of opportunities for spiritual growth. We may come to know ourselves more deeply. We may strengthen our relationship to the Divine. We may learn trust and patience though periods of uncertainty. These experiences will become the bricks upon which any future marriage is built. Those who hope to find a partner may feel frustrated as they wait for the right person to appear or for that person to commit. They may feel they can't begin the journey until someone else joins them. But the path of committed relationship begins with our approach toward singleness and dating. Rejecting the consumer approach to love and learning to trust in love's abundance will lead to a different type of relationship than desperate, manipulative dating tactics.

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© 1998 by Eileen Flanagan

Tags: Marriage, Finding Love and Soulmate (For Women), Spirituality

About the Author

I don't know if this book will change anyone else's life, but it certainly changed mine! The process of writing about the spiritual nature of loving helped to open me up to love in my own life. Chapter topics presented themselves as I moved from singleness to dating to commitment. My writing and my life enriched each other along the way. The fact that I now am able to share that story with others through this book is an added blessing. More