Of Marriage and Mushrooms
The Reverend Ragan Sutterfield
The 20th Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, October 6, Proper 22B
Mark 10:2-16
A few months back, skimming over the website of the New York Times, my eye was caught by a question: “I think my husband has dementia. Can I leave him before it worsens?” Those words were the headline of the “Ethicist” column—a place for readers to pose their moral quandaries to a professional philosopher. The philosopher’s answer was sound but tame—maybe consider counseling, he advised. Still, the question stayed with me. It seemed to name a problem common to many people’s view of marriage—an understanding of fidelity tied to fulfillment.
What good is marriage? It’s a question our world answers with increasing ambivalence. There are plenty of people who seem to enjoy the fruits of love, even children, without any institutional confinement. As a friend shared the wisdom of her mentor with me: “you have one partner for your youth, one to raise children with, and one to grow old with.” Why complicate the freedom of such possibilities with a contract, much less a sacrament? When both partners know that this lasts only as long as we’re getting something out of the relationship, it is no great surprise that when an illness comes or a hard time arrives, the marriage ends. Marriage, in this accounting, is not a gift in which we become participants, but an enterprise of mutual self-interest.
The first century did not have newspapers, but they were no less interested in the moral quandaries of human life. Their “ethicist” columns took place on the streets, where difficult questions could be posed to rabbis before crowds of curious onlookers. So it was that a group of religious folks came to ask Jesus about one of the pressing issues among them: on what grounds is it okay to divorce one’s wife?
This was an issue of debate at the time. One of the most influential rabbi’s of the era, Rabbi Hillel, had said that a man could divorce his wife on as thin a ground as a disapproval of her cooking. On the other side was Rabbi Shammei, who took a more conservative approach, arguing that only infidelity could end a marriage. Both camps generally ignored the view of women, who were stuck in marriages no matter their husbands cooking or infidelity. It was into this fray that the Pharisees wanted to know where Jesus, the ethicist, stood.
In his typical, probing way, Jesus takes an uninteresting question and pushes it deeper. A focus on divorce, Jesus says in effect, misses the question that should be asked first: What is the purpose of marriage? It’s a purpose Jesus answers by turning our attention all the way back to the beginning of creation.
This may seem to be a strange move. We think of marriage as a cultural rather than a natural aspect of the human person, not a thing that is part of human life from the very beginning. In Jesus’ response, though, we find that culture and nature are not so easily separable as our modern minds might make them. Marriage, Jesus implies, is an aspect of our creaturely life.
Of course this is not to imply that everyone must be married to live fully into being a human creature. Jesus, after all was not married, and neither were many of his early followers. But, as the church has come to name it, marriage is a sacrament —a means of making visible an often hidden aspect of our world. In this, marriage is something like a mushroom.
In the woodland park near my home in Little Rock, mushrooms are beginning to fruit for their fall flush. On a handful of oaks, standing and fallen, I will soon see the white bearded forms of Lion’s Main or Hedgehog mushrooms. On the forest floor, puff balls are appearing, and alongside them bolus mushrooms standing in a classic toadstool form. All of these mushrooms are the fruits of a larger creature, a mycelial fungus whose entirety could span a wide swath of the park. Invisible and yet essential, mycorhyzal fungi are the connectors of the forest floor, linking trees and plants in what some have called the “wood wide web.” And yet, until a mushroom appears, this relational reality is hidden.
Marriage—what is meant to be a deep, committed togetherness of two people, is an appearance of a fundamental and yet otherwise often hidden reality of the world. All creation is relational, all creation exists and is connected through the loving embrace of God’s faithful presence. It is easy, however, to miss this larger reality. We might just see a mushroom, without recognizing the larger connections its surfacing signals. In the same way, we might see a marriage as two people joining in a cultural tradition, without recognizing the deeper revelation of the relationship that runs through all creation. When we miss those hidden realities made briefly visible, it becomes easy for us to see creation as a collection of resources to be exploited and marriage as a mere arrangement for mutual fulfillment.
I’ve found a great deal of help in understanding the nature of marriage from the writer and farmer, Wendell Berry. In his poetry, fiction, and essays, Berry continually links the work of marriage with the care of creation, a reality expressed in fidelity to the larger community of life he calls “the membership.” For Berry, divorce is less a personal tragedy than a dominating story of our world. As he writes, “We all come from divorce. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart.” People have been divorced from the land, creatures have been divorced from the systems of life, communities have been separated from one another. Even marriage, Berry writes, “has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” While our lives should be built through the links of affection, shared attention and work, we have sought to split up the world, each seeking the largest share we can acquire.
This is the reality of a world dominated by markets, where land becomes nothing more than a resource and marriage is simply a means to fulfillment. In such an atmosphere our affections are turned into utilities. But marriage is not a utility, it is a belonging that makes visible the larger togetherness of mutual dependence that is our creaturely life. In an echo of Christ, who as the writer of Hebrews said made visible the unseen God, marriage is way of showing the hidden wholeness at the heart of creation.
Such knowledge and love requires a continuous presence, a faithful commitment. When we leave behind any deep belonging, to place or people, we are severing a connection through which we are able to share the gifts of life. This is why our marriage vows include a promise of fidelity through the vagaries of health, the ups and downs of finances. Those are the common markers of our lives as fragile, dependent human creatures. We know, even before we get started, that to be in a marriage or a friendship or even just to exist as a creature, there are many times in our lives that we won’t be useful or productive. We may even be burdens. But there is no care, no true belonging, without such burdens.
My wife Emily and I had a conversation one evening many years ago that has long stayed with both of us. She had been taking our oldest daughter, who was only two at the time, to visit some of the residents in a local nursing home. One of the people she met there was a woman in the memory care unit. Every day, her husband would come to be with her, even though she no longer remembered who he was.
His love and fidelity had both moved and troubled Emily. “What does love matter,” she asked, “if one day we can’t even remember one another?” I was in seminary at the time, and had been reading theology of the best kind—practical and helpful to those deepest human questions. Grasping at that theology, I offered a truth I’d come across: “Each of us, alone and together, are held in the love of God. God remembers what we can’t, God preserves our life in the fullness of God’s love.” It was a comfort in our conversation to speak that truth aloud, and it answers the question the woman writing to the New York Times so boldly posed.
Our loves, our belonging to one another, is not for our momentary fulfillment. Love, committed love, is an invitation to a fidelity in which we can find a larger flourishing. Marriage, and all our forms of faithfulness, are a chance for us to inhabit a larger reality—the love of God that has been present since the very beginning of creation. Whether we are married or not, divorced or not, we can all belong in that greater embrace. To enter it, we must give up our evaluation of the world as a place to fulfill our wants and needs. Instead, we must learn to practice the work of participation in that wider goodness of all creation, a creation born and sustained by love. Amen.
© 2024 The Rev. Ragan Sutterfield
