Good Morning, DJ: Thinking About Married Life

Copyright © 2018 by John Anthony Rogers. All rights reserved.

eBook ISBN 978-1-54394-731-1

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JAROGERS70@COMCAST.NET

BWR

this is the Song we have been singing

this is the Vision we have been seeking

this is the Mystery we are unfolding

this is the Prayer we are becoming

…learning to love

Contents

Introduction

1. N EW B EGINNING / May 10, 2005

2. S ACRAMENT AND V OCATION / June 5

3. Q UESTIONS / July 13

4. Y OUR D AY / July 31

5. D ISTRESSED / August 12

6. A PPRECIATE / August 17

7. S IMPLIFY / August 24

8. I NTENTION / August 26

9. B EAUTY / August 28

10. A TTENDING / September 4

11. U NKNOWING / September 25

12. A TTUNING / September 28

13. S EXUALITY / October 9

14. S TUFF / November 7

15. I NTENTION AND I NTENSION / November 25

16. P ROSPECTS / November 30

17. I NTIMACY / December 6

18. B EAUTIFY / December 11

19. W EDDING D AY / December 17

20. T RANSITION / January 1, 2006

21. J OURNEY / February 13

22. A P RAYER / April 15, 2007

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

WHEN DEBORAH JOHANNA and Aubrea Leigh were teenagers, occasionally I wrote them notes on values and principles and worldviews—things they might not fully understand or agree with in the moment but hopefully might return to later in life. I continued writing notes to Deborah when she went to Howard University in 1995 and later during graduate study at Fuller Theological Seminary. Then in the spring of 2005 when she announced her intention to marry, I began a series of notes to her and her fiancé about the journey they were about to begin.

In May 2005 Barbara and I had been married for thirty years. So the notes I wrote then were more than wishful thoughts for a happy future. They were a distillation of our journeying and evolving together—success and failure, hurting and forgiving, learning and unlearning, being and becoming.

In the years that followed, Deborah and I occasionally spoke of penning reflections on the notes I had sent; but that shared intention never materialized. However, our conversations provided impetus for my returning to the notes ten-plus years after the initial writing, and forty-plus years after beginning my evolving in married life.

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In the original notes and subsequent reflections, I don’t present a sustained argument or set of propositions on married life. I do suggest key themes, principles and dynamics that may support and sustain married life as a primary context for our emergence. Here are some of the main ideas that appear throughout.

When writing in 2005, the ideas of presence and blessing were not explicit foci, though I did mention them together at the end of the August 17 (Appreciate) note when discussing wedding as covenant ceremony: "I will be with you always, and my presence will be blessing." Only later did it occur to me that in the ‘presence’ of 24/7 distractions, real presence is the path, difficult and necessary, to blessing—emergence, maturation, co-creativity—in married life.

In the spring of 2016, while reading Rollo May’s Courage to Create, the words covenant and creativity became lodged in my thinking.¹ Eventually I associated covenant with presence and creativity with blessing. Covenant emerges from and is sustained by committed and binding presence. Blessing calls into being latent potential, creating new possibility. So where I speak of presence in the context of married life, you might think of covenant; and where I speak of blessing, you might think of creativity.

While writing, editing and designing, I also was reminded that creativity manifests our aspiring, journeying, praying, toward THE-ONE-more-than-ourselves, from which (Whom) and toward which (Whom) we are emerging and evolving. And our aspiring, journeying and praying are not just activities we do; they are who we are. As Julia Cameron writes:

We are an expression of the Great Creator, and we in turn are intended to create. It is not mere ego but our divine birthright to create. We carry creativity within us as surely as we carry our blood; and, in expressing it, we express our full humanity, which is far more than material. When we fail to answer this calling, when we turn it aside and listen to voices that deflect us, we are not in alignment with our own nature, nor with what might be called our destiny.²

In the context of presence-covenant and blessing-creativity is another significant dynamic: integrating-differentiating. Ideally as we lean (live) into marital covenant (integrating), this intense loving presence enhances our emergence (differentiating). We are invited or coaxed toward authenticity. Ideally we are learning to love; we are becoming love. However, differentiating also may lead to distancing and perhaps even dissolution when the dynamics of integrating are weak or being weakened.³

Another lens or metaphor by which to consider married life, and which relates to the notion of creativity, is work—How do we make married life work? Married life takes work. Married life is hard work. This may represent a true and perhaps necessary perspective given the inherent dynamics of merging two lives, or more in cases of blending families. But what if we combine work with art? Married life as work of art, creating or calling forth virtue, bringing beauty to life, bringing beauty to light. Of art, Finley Eversole writes:

Art, by its very nature, is a transformative process, an act of re-creation….Art is nothing if not creative. It is a place where the possibilities of growth are kept open.…One of the principal virtues of art, therefore, is as a path of preparation by which the soul is moved toward the realization of its own supreme destiny.⁴

An intriguing metaphor because we are the raw materials and the artists—and some would add ideally with the inspiration of Divine Artist.⁵

The term essential points toward what are the most fundamental expressions of, what inheres to, our humanity. This is important to consider as we find ourselves increasingly in manufactured and virtual realities that may appear to represent necessary components of daily life and/or fundamental constituents of our humanness. We also live in a time that seems increasingly dismissive of a spiritual facet to life, while experiencing an exhausting, a depleting, of personal and relational energies as well as natural material resources. As Marianne Williamson notes:

The ravages produced by our spiritual ignorance are now being experienced on massive scales, producing deep psychological and emotional problems in individuals and seemingly unstoppable environmental and political destructiveness.⁶

I also juxtapose essential and Essential, recognizing the fundamental affirmation of various faith and spiritual traditions that we are manifestations—albeit generally very flawed manifestations—of the Divine. Including Essential potentially alters our understanding of the underlying dynamics of individual and marital emergence.

Intention, whether conscious or not, points toward what drives or precipitates our initiatives and responses. As Ray Anderson writes, intention is:

the act of will by which persons enter into commitments toward one another, make promises, and sustain relationship as purposeful and meaningful. We must admit that love is basically intentional rather than merely an affect or attitude.⁷

Within married life, becoming continuously aware of intention (intending) is integral to the experience of co-creating intimacy. Balancing habit, custom, tradition, spontaneity and intentional presence is a crucial aspect of marital creativity.

As words and actions manifest intending, understanding and growing through marital conflict entails going to the root that is intending. And this is no easy task as we are enticed, encouraged and nurtured to experience daily life on the surface rather than in the depth of being. Getting beneath the surface of normal or normative everydayness can be deeply distressing or rewarding; and there is no certainty where we will end up. For those living within religious or spiritual traditions, reconciling what is perceived as Divine Intention and the patterns of intending provided by dominant social and cultural systems may be at the heart of human emergence and becomes a primary focus for religious or spiritual practice and discipline.

The desire for stability, control, security and comfort may constrain imagination to function within familiar parameters, limiting openness to new relational possibilities. What do we perceive as valuable or meaningful in the moment? What prospects do we see on the horizon? What resources are available to sustain and enhance relationship? The need is to identify nonessential (non-Essential) habituated responses that constrain co-creating potential within married life and then to release imagination (mind-heart) to perceive and nurture possibilities for further personal and relational emergence.

Intense presence—intentional, sustained, binding, proximal physical and spiritual engagement—is the ground, the foundation, of formative and transformative potential and dynamics within married life: integrating and differentiating, tensing the relational body-space, emptying and filling, speaking and silencing, knowing and unknowing. Intense does not mean intentionally harsh. It does mean intentionally, truthfully and transparently engaged. It also is a learned or acquired presence characteristic of a particular relationship. It is not transposed or imposed; it emerges and evolves.

Our essential (Essential) nature is process; and we are existentially insecure. The quest is reconciling the desire for certainty and security with the reality of our continuous emergence—unfolding-enfolding,⁸ being-becoming, evolving. I enter into covenant with someone that I anticipate will change in ways I don’t anticipate. I also anticipate that I will change in ways that I don’t anticipate. Ideally our process evolves, providing synergy for our emerging gracefulness—which also eventually may extend to others, others-than-human and OTHER-than-human.

In some spiritual and religious traditions, desert and wilderness represent periods of transition and transformation. The familiar fades giving rise to times of imparting, incubating and revealing. These images can apply to married life as portal to creative transformation. Whether we find ourselves thrust into wilderness or desert or we choose them to survive or to thrive, the aim is to release imagination to discern and engage re-creative potential.

We do not ultimately control what occurs in wilderness or desert; we adapt within the dynamic and evolving ecosystem. Wilderness and desert are not intended to hurt but to evoke and awaken, calling us to become present to emergent potentials resident, though perhaps hidden, in the context of our relationships. We can’t traverse desert or wilderness on autopilot; we have to be attentive. The quest is not a desert or wilderness makeover but to experience personal and relational revealing.⁹ Eventually we may incorporate wilderness and desert dynamics into our relational repertoire.

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EACH SEGMENT BEGINS with the original note, identified by the date it was written. The headings under the dates were were added for this writing. Following each original note are two later reflections, titled Presence and Blessing, and a list of references.

The Conclusion circles back to where we began, reflecting further on the ideas of creativity and covenant. For example, there I write:

Think of married life as work of art manifest in the crafting of the marriage covenant over the course of shared lifetimes, not just in terms of spoken vows, which may (though not necessarily) articulate the framework of the covenant. The covenant is not, perhaps never, a finished project. It is, rather, an intention in perpetual process.

So if, as when doing a puzzle, you wish to frame the conversation first, you can read the Conclusion before engaging the original notes and subsequent reflections.

Finally, a disclaimer. Nothing herein condones committing or submitting to abuse within married life. Intense marital presence represents sacred space of revealing and healing, of creativity and synergy. Intimacy is gift and privilege. Abuse—physical, emotional, spiritual¹⁰—has no place. It is a radical contravening of the marital covenant.

1. Rollo May, The Courage to Create (Norton, 1975). May associates creativity with intense sustained transformative encounter—characteristics that are consistent with the idea of covenant in general and marital covenant in particular.

2. Julia Cameron, Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity (Tarcher/Putnam, 2002), chap. 11, Discovering a Sense of Authenticity, 231. See Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Tarcher/Penguin, 2002), chap. 2, Creativity, Our True Nature; Erwin Raphael McManus, The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life into a Work of Art (HarperOne,