Tag: Stanley Hauerwas
1 Recapturing Advent
As stated here previously, Stanley Hauerwas is one of my theological heroes, not the least because he’s paved the way for someone like me to be frequently contrary, often inappropriate and usually badly dressed. Stanley, a militant pacifist, has done much to help the Church recover its identity as a witnessing minority to a world that knows not God. Or, as the Jews put it, to be “a light to the nations.” Here’s a short reflection that’s worth a quick look see: Recapturing Advent
1 A Pacifist’s Appreciation on Veterans’ Day
Stanley Hauerwas, one of the most significant theological influences in my life, is a self-professed militant pacifist. He’s someone who believes passionately that nonviolent love is at the heart of the gospel and what it means to follow Jesus.
That said, Hauerwas expresses admiration for the military and for the skills the military possesses that the Church has lost. Namely, the military understands that virtues are learned and acquired through habit, practice and the mentoring of master to apprentice. The military understands that concepts such as honor, sacrifice, and commitment to others over commitment to self are not easily or automatically learned. They can’t simply be agreed to or believed rationally. They must be habituated through practices passed down from one with wisdom and authority. They must be habituated so that they become embodied, reflexive and at the core one’s identity.
In other words, the military, Hauerwas says, are often better at making disciples than the Church. Most churches act as though one can be a Christian without training, conversion, or apprenticeship. Just by believing in Jesus and leaving it at that. No one in the military has ever believed you can be a soldier just by wanting to be one, without the purgative and formative experience of basic training etc.
So on Veterans Day maybe that’s the appreciative nod the Church can offer our armed forces: they know how to form character and we in the Church could learn from their wisdom.
1 A Better Conversation about Abortion #3
A Better Conversation about Abortion #3
Thanks to what’s-his-name Akin in Missouri, a campaign season that was supposed to be dominated by economic issues instead now feels like every other divisive, social-issue election. Ross Douthat had a piece in Sunday’s NY Times, questioning whether this development is bad for both parties and not just the Republicans.
I don’t know about the politics of it, but I do know that Christian conversation on the issue should rise above what’s offered by pundits and politicians.
Earlier this week, I posted about a girl named ‘Rachel’ who was my first pastoral encounter with abortion as a moral dilemma.
Rachel was the first person who impressed upon me the truth and urgency of Stanley Hauerwas’ comments that, for Christians, “abortion is not fundamentally a question about law, but about what kind of people we are to be as the church and as Christians.” In other words, to rephrase Hauerwas in the context of my anecdotes: what if Rachel- pregnant and addicted to drugs and alcohol, without a job or an education- had belonged to a Christian community dedicated to embodying the example of Acts 4? If Rachel had had such a community, then I believe all our cultural debates about “rights” and “privacy” and “the sanctity of life” would have become less immediate.
What Rachel most needed was not to be compelled by the law in any certain direction. She desperately needed a community who would care for her, who would refuse to judge or condemn her, who would hold her accountable and who would do so by bearing her burden with her.
Certainly Christians have a right and a responsibility to advocate for our beliefs in the public square, but our calling, first and foremost, is to be a community. The Holy Spirit gave birth not to a group of believers who first lobbied for their convictions to be reflected in public policy. The Holy Spirit gave birth to a community in which the wider world might see the Gospel of Jesus Christ lived. The Holy Spirit gave birth to a community that would, by divine design, look different from the larger world- a community where the New Creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ was embodied.
As the Didache indicates, the early Christians- much like today’s Christians- practiced their faith in the context of an empire that did not share their beliefs or ethics. One of the ways those first Christians embodied the reality of the New Creation was by adopting the unwanted babies that the empire abandoned to exposure and death. The early Christian community was characterized not by laws, platforms or positions but by witness.
So too today, I believe the world most needs to be shown, not forced by law, a different possibility of life. The world needs to be shown a community where the wants and impoverishments that often pressure women to have abortions no longer exist because this particular community shares all of its possessions together. The world needs not to be told by force of law that there is no right to the privacy of the body. Rather the world needs to be shown what a community looks like where its members, by virtue of baptism, all belong to one another.
I do not think that Christians will ever persuade others to our convictions until Christians learn how in community to embody a more persuasive form of life. In other words, if the energy and time that so many Christians now devote to enacting their beliefs in the public square were instead given to creating the sort of community we find in Acts, then I believe what would emerge would be a true place of refuge and a light to the nation.
0 A Better Conversation about Abortion – #2
While I was still in seminary, I served as the part-time pastor of a tiny Methodist church in New Jersey. One fall afternoon, while I was in the sanctuary preparing things for Sunday worship, a middle-aged woman wandered inside. I did not know her or recognize her. Appearing nervous, she asked if she could speak with the minister.
Because the small church did not have an office for the pastor, we sat down in a pew. I could tell she was uncomfortable being in the sanctuary, talking with a pastor. I could tell too that she was exhausted and that she had been crying. The woman proceeded to tell me about her nineteen year old daughter, ‘Rachel,’ who had a drug and alcohol problem. ‘Rachel’ did not have a job, was not in school, and had recently become pregnant. Rachel’s mother cried and shared how confused and overwhelmed she felt. Rachel was her only family. She had no one to whom she could turn. Rachel, she knew, was not able to raise a child and, given her addictions, she worried what would be the resulting health of Rachel’s baby.
Rachel’s mother suddenly asked me if it was wrong for her daughter to get an abortion. “Does the bible say that it’s wrong?” she asked me.
Looking back at that conversation, what most strikes me is not the inadequacy of my answers. What strikes me most is that this woman and her daughter had absolutely no community to turn for comfort, help or discernment.
Last week I mentioned in a post that abortion is an issue that calls for discernment because there are no scriptural texts we can use as direct references. Texts, for example, that speak of God ‘knowing us even in our mother’s womb’ are primarily poetic texts that speak volumes about God’s providence but say very little about how that broad confession applies to a particular moral question.
The best text to apply to the question of abortion, I believe, is one that, on the surface, would seem to have nothing to do with the issue.
Biblical scholar, Richard Hays, argues that Christians looking for moral guidance on abortion can read scripture in a paradigmatic mode. In other words, the New Testament, in particular, contains several key texts that, while they do not speak to abortion explicitly, do commend certain behaviors that can inform how Christians approach multiple moral issues, including abortion.
The first paradigmatic text that Hays turns to is Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, which is found in Luke’s Gospel (10.25-37). In Luke’s telling, Jesus is asked by a lawyer how he might inherit eternal life. Jesus replies, in good rabbinic fashion, with a reference to the Shema from Deuteronomy 6.5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind; you shall your neighbor as yourself.”
This would not have been a surprising answer to the lawyer; he probably anticipated just this reply from Jesus because he pushes back, pressing Jesus to be more precise: “Who is my neighbor?” Most likely, the lawyer also knew that, according to the Jewish law, ‘neighbor’ in this case meant a fellow Israelite.
Luke tells us that by asking Jesus this question the lawyer sought to justify himself. That is, the lawyer wanted Jesus to narrowly and specifically define who counted as his neighbor. With the parameters of moral obligation more narrowly defined the lawyer could be comforted that he was a righteous, justified person.
Jesus instead surprises the lawyer with an unexpected, upsetting story about a Samaritan showing loving mercy where righteous Jews did not and then turning the question back onto the lawyer: “Who was the neighbor?”
Samaritans, in the first century world of Jesus, were not only hated and mistrusted outsiders, they were non-Jews. In telling this story, Jesus refuses narrow definitions of our ethical obligations. Jesus expands the reaches of our moral duty and, by casting a Samaritan (a non-neighbor by Jewish law) as a neighbor, Jesus actually creates a new moral obligation where none existed before.
How does this story inform Christians’ reflection on abortion? It’s not simply that unborn children are our neighbors. Richard Hays notes that this parable reminds Christians that our call to show mercy to the helpless extends beyond the obligations defined by convention or by culture.
Our obligation to be neighbors to the helpless includes both the unborn and the mothers and families of the unborn.
Jesus’ parable also cautions Christians against approaching the abortion debate with the same questions that the culture often asks. Hays argues that when Christians become preoccupied with asking questions such as: ‘When does life begin?’ and ‘When is a fetus a person?’ we risk casting ourselves as the lawyer in Jesus’ story instead of the Samaritan. We risk limiting the scope of our ethical obligation rather than recognizing the expansive reach of our call to be merciful.
The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us that, when it comes to the issue of abortion, our first step as Christians is to resist the culture’s definitions of neighbors and to recognize that we have a duty to all involved.
2 A Letter to Young Christians on their Way to College
Many friends are in the midst of resuming or beginning their college and graduate schools. And many of their parents are suffering a mixture of joy and sadness.
Too often we in the church have a sort of empty nest mentality about our youth who leave for school, thinking that our job- like their parents’- is to get them to graduation. We neglect our calling if we no longer attempt to shape and minster to students after they’ve left for study. What’s more, we do students a profound disservice if fail to convey to them how their study is but the next step in their Christian calling. To learn and glean wisdom from those who’ve come before could not be a more Christian discipline.
Here’s a letter from First Things by one of my intellectual heroes, Stanley Hauerwas. For the last couple of years, I’ve copied it and mailed to some students with whom I’m close. I think it’s a wise piece that any student, or even their parents, could appreciate.
“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”
Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be faithful in worship. In America, going to college is one of those heavily mythologized events that everybody tells you will “change your life,” which is probably at least half true. So don’t be foolish and imagine that you can take a vacation from church.
Be uncompromisingly moral. Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess. Good kids from good families too often end up using their four years at college to get drunk and throw up on one another. Too often they do so on their way to the condom dispensers. What a waste! Not only because such behavior is self-destructive but also because living this way will prevent you from doing the intellectual work the Christian faith demands. Be deeply intellectual. We—that is, the Church—need you to do well in school. That may sound strange, because many who represent Christian values seem concerned primarily with how you conduct yourself while you are in college; they relegate the Christian part of being in college to what is done outside the classroom.
The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. Whatever the practical source, the end result is the same. You are privileged to enter a time—four years!—during which your main job is to listen to lectures, attend seminars, go to labs, and read books.
It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What ishe thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.”
But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job. These days, people talk about college as an investment because they think of education as a bank account: You deposit the knowledge and expertise you’ve earned, and when it comes time to get a job, you make a withdrawal, putting all that stuff on a résumé and making money off the investment of your four years. Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They’re not yours to do with as you please. They’re Christ’s.
Christ’s call on you as a student is a calling to meet the needs of the Church, both for its own life and the life of the world. The Resurrection of Jesus, Wilken suggests, is not only the central fact of Christian worship but also the ground of all Christian thinking “about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Somebody needs to do that thinking—and that means you.
Don’t underestimate how much the Church needs your mind. Remember your Bible-study class? Christians read Isaiah’s prophecy of a suffering servant as pointing to Christ. That seems obvious, but it’s not; or at least it wasn’t obvious to the Ethiopian eunuch to whom the Lord sent Philip to explain things. Christ is written everywhere, not only in the prophecies of the Old Testament but also in the pages of history and in the book of nature. The Church has been explaining, interpreting, and illuminating ever since it began. It takes an educated mind to do the Church’s work of thinking about and interpreting the world in light of Christ. Physics, sociology, French literary theory: All these and more—in fact, everything you study in college—is bathed in the light of Christ. It takes the eyes of faith to see that light, and it takes an educated mind to understand and articulate it.
There’s another dimension to the call of intellectual work. In the First Letter of Peter we read, “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (3:15). Not everybody believes. In fact, the contemporary American secular university is largely a place of unbelief. Thus, the Church has a job to do: to explain why belief in the risen Lord actually makes sense. There’s no one formula, no one argument, so don’t imagine you will find the magic defense against all objections. You can, however, offer the reasonable defense Peter asks for. You may at least make someone think twice before he rejects the risen Lord.
Anyway, defense isn’t the point. Lots of people feel lost because they imagine being a sophisticated, contemporary intellectual makes faith impossible. The Church wants to reach these people, but to do so requires an ambassador at home in the intellectual world. That’s you—or at least that’s what you can become if you do your work with enthusiasm. Share in a love of learning. It’s a worthy love in its own right, and it will allow you to be the leaven in the lump of academia.
So, yes, to be a student is to be called to serve the Church and the world. But always remember who serves what. Colleges focus on learning; as they do so, they can create the illusion that being smart and well educated is the be-all and end-all of life. You do not need to be educated to be a Christian. That’s obvious. After all, Christ is most visible to the world in the person who responds to his call of “Come, follow me.” I daresay St. Francis of Assisi was more important to the medieval Church than any intellectual. One of the most brilliant men in the history of the Church, St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, said as much. But the Church needs some Christians to be educated, as St. Bonaventure also knew; this is why he taught at the University of Paris and ensured that, in their enthusiasm for the example of St. Francis, his brother Franciscans didn’t give up on education.
The best way to think about the relation between your calling as a student and the many other callings of Christians can be found in 1 Corinthians 12. In this letter Paul is dealing with a community in turmoil as various factions claim priority. It’s the same situation today. Pastors consider preaching and evangelizing the most important thing. Teachers consider education the most important thing. Social activists argue for the priority of making the world more just. Still others insist that internal spiritual renewal is the key to everything. St. Paul, however, reminds the Church at Corinth that it comprises a variety of gifts that serve to build up the Church’s common good. To one person is given wisdom, to others knowledge, to still others the work of healing, prophecy, and the discernment of the spirits. By all means honor those who are serving the Church in the ordained ministry, or through social action, or through spiritual direction. But remember: You are about to become a student—not a pastor, a social worker, or a spiritual director. Whatever you end up doing with your life, now is the time when you develop the intellectual skills the Church needs for the sake of building up the Body of Christ.
Your Christian calling as a student does not require you to become a theologian, at least not in the official sense of the word. Speaking as one whose job title is Professor of Theology, I certainly hope you will be attracted to the work of theology. These days—at least in the West, where the dominant intellectual trends have detached themselves from Christianity—the discipline of theology is in a world of hurt, often tempted by silly efforts to dress up the gospel in the latest academic fashions. So God knows we need all the help we can get.
But there is a wider sense of being a theologian, one that simply means thinking about what you are learning in light of Christ. This does not happen by making everything fit into Church doctrine or biblical preaching—that’s theology in the strict, official sense. Instead, to become a Christian scholar is more a matter of intention and desire, of bearing witness to Christ in the contemporary world of science, literature, and so forth.
You can’t do this on your own. You’ll need friends who major in physics and biology as well as in economics, psychology, philosophy, literature, and every other discipline. These friends can be teachers and fellow students, of course, but, for the most part, our intellectual friendships are channeled through books. C.S. Lewis has remained popular with Christian students for many good reasons, not the least of which is that he makes himself available to his readers as a trusted friend in Christ. That’s true for many other authors too. Get to know them.
Books, moreover, are often the way in which our friendships with our fellow students and teachers begin and in which these friendships become cemented. I’m not a big fan of Francis Schaeffer, but he can be a point of contact—something to agree with or argue about. The same is true for all writers who tackle big questions. Read Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and not just because you might learn something. Read them because doing so will provide a sharpness and depth to your conversations. To a great extent, becoming an educated person means adding lots of layers to your relationships. Sure, going to the big football game or having a beer (legally) with your buddies should be fun on its own terms, but it’s also a reality ripe for analysis, discussion, and conversation. If you read Mary Douglas or Claude Levi-Strauss, you’ll have something to say about the rituals of American sports. And if you read Jane Austen or T.S. Eliot, you’ll find you see conversations with friends, particularly while sharing a meal, in new ways. And, of course, you cannot read enough Trollope. Think of books as the fine threads of a spider’s web. They link and connect.
This is especially true for your relationships with your teachers. You are not likely to become buddies with your teachers. They tend to be intimidating. But you can become intellectual friends, and this will most likely happen if you’ve read some of the same books. This is even true for science professors. You’re unlikely to engage a physics professor in an interesting conversation about subatomic particles. As a freshman you don’t know enough. But read C.P. Snow’s book The Two Cultures, and I’ll bet your physics teacher will want to know what you’re thinking. Books are touchstones, common points of reference. They are the water in which our minds swim.
You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual. I confess I am not altogether happy with the word intellectual as a descriptor for those who are committed to the work of the university. The word is often associated with people who betray a kind of self-indulgence, an air that they do not need to justify why they do what they do. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is the dogma used to justify such an understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. But if you’re clear about your calling as a student, you can avoid this temptation. You are called to the life of the mind to be of service to the gospel and the Church. Don’t resist this call just because others are misusing it.
Fulfilling your calling as a Christian student won’t be easy. It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia. Some professors have convinced themselves that all knowledge is just political power dressed up in fancy language, or that books and ideas are simply ideological weapons in the quest for domination. Christians, of all people, should recognize that what is known and how it is known produce and reproduce power relations that are unjust, but this does not mean all questions of truth must be abandoned. As I said, it won’t be easy.
You owe it to yourself and to the Church not to let the incoherence, laziness, and self-critical excesses of the contemporary university demoralize you. Be sure not to let these failures become an excuse for you to avoid an education—a Christian education. Although some universities make it quite easy to avoid being well educated, I think you will find that every university or college has teachers who deserve the titles they’ve been given. Your task is to find them.
But how can you find the best teachers? There are no set principles, but I can suggest some guidelines. First, ask around. Are there professors who have reputations as intellectual mentors of Christian students? You’re eighteen. You don’t need substitute parents—or, at least, you don’t need parents who think you are still twelve. But you do need reliable guides. So rearrange your schedule to take the professor who teaches Dante with sensitivity to the profound theological vision of that great poet. You may end up disagreeing, both with the professor and with Dante, but you’ll learn how to think as a Christian.
Also, go to the bookstore at the beginning of the term to see which professors assign books—and I mean real books, not textbooks. Textbooks can play a legitimate role in some disciplines, but not in all, and never at all levels. You want to find the teachers who have intellectual friends, as it were, and who want to share those friends with their students. If a professor has a course outline that gives two or three weeks to reading St. Augustine’s Confessions, you can reasonably hope that he thinks of St. Augustine as someone he knows (or wants to know) and as someone he wants to share with students.
The best teachers for a Christian student aren’t always Christians. In fact, a certain kind of Christian teacher can lead you astray. It’s not easy to see the truth of Christ in modern science or contemporary critical theory, for example. The temptation is to compartmentalize, to assign your faith to the heart, perhaps, and then carry on with your academic work. Some professors have become very comfortable with this compartmentalization, so be careful. By all means take spiritual encouragement wherever you can get it; these sorts of professors can be helpful in that regard. But don’t compartmentalize, because that’s basically putting your Christian faith outside of your work as a student.
Your calling is to be a Christian student. The Christian part and the student part are inseparable. It will be hard and frustrating because you won’t see how the two go together. Nobody does, at least not in the sense of having worked it all out. But you need to remember what Christ said: “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” However uncertain we are about how, we know that being a Christian goes with being a student (and a teacher).
Although many professors are not Christians (at some schools, most aren’t), many professors have a piety especially relevant to the academic life. One, for example, might be committed to the intrinsic importance of knowing Wordsworth’s poetry, while another works at getting the chemistry experiment right. These professors convey a spirit of devotion. Their intellectual lives serve the subject matter rather than treating it as information to be mastered or, worse, a dead body of knowledge to be conveyed to students. English literature and modern science do not exist for their own sakes, and the university doesn’t raise money for the sake of professors’ careers. For these professors, the educational system exists for the sake of their disciplines, which they willingly serve. This spirit of devotion is not the same as Christian faith, but it can help shape your young intellectual desires and impulses in the right way by reminding you that your job as a student is to serve and not to be served. College isn’t for you; it’s for your Christian calling as an intellectual.
Eventually, you will no longer be a freshman, and American undergraduate education will force you to begin to specialize. This will present dangers as well as opportunities. You will be tempted to choose a major that will give you a sense of coherence. But be careful your major does not narrow you in the wrong way. It’s true, for example, that modern psychology provides powerful insights into the human condition, but don’t allow your increasing expertise to lure you into illusions of mastery. Continue reading broadly. It may seem that the more you know about less and less, the smarter you’ve become; after all, you now know so much more about psychology! But, in truth, the more you know about less and less should teach you humility. After a couple of years spent taking advanced courses in modern European history, you’ll know more about the French Revolution, but, if you’re self-reflective, you’ll also know how much work it takes to know anything well. And there’s so much more to know about reality than modern European history.
To combat a tendency toward the complacency that comes from mastering a discipline, it is particularly important that you gain historical insight into the practice of your discipline. For example, I have nothing but high regard for those disciplines we group under the somewhat misleading category “the sciences.” Too often, though, students have no idea how and why the scientific fields’ research agendas developed into their current form of practice. To go back and read Isaac Newton can be a bit of a shock, because he interwove his scientific analysis with theological arguments. You shouldn’t take this as a mandate for doing the same thing in the twenty-first century. It should, however, make you realize that modern science has profound metaphysical and theological dimensions that have to be cordoned off, perhaps for good reasons. Or perhaps not. The point is that knowing the history of your discipline will, inevitably, broaden the kinds of questions you ask and force you to read to be an intellectual rather than just a specialist.
It is also important that you not accept as a given the categorizations that dominate the contemporary university. For example, if you read Dante, you probably will do so in the English department. The English department has claimed Dante because it considers the Inferno “literature.” Dante obviously was a poet, and one of the most influential, but he also was a theologian, and we fail to do him justice if we ignore that quite specific theological convictions, some controversial in his own day and in ours as well, were at the center of his life and work. The same can be said for the theology department, which often imagines that a particular form of scholastic and philosophically shaped reflection defines the discipline even as the departmental theologians ignore the mystical traditions as well as the traditions of biblical commentary.
To see the rest of the article click here.
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School.
0 Is It Possible to Marry the Right Person?
I make it a point in wedding counseling, when presented with the inevitable opening- something droll and sentimental like ‘we’re so much in love,’ to reply: ‘big deal, so what? Being in love is probably the worst time to make a life-changing decision.’
I stole that quip from Stanley Hauerwas. It’s true. Love can blind people into making bone-headed decisions that are obvious to everyone else. It does, in fact.
Tim Keller in his book, The Meaning of Marriage, steals another of Hauerwas’ maxims: ‘You always marry the wrong person.’
In generations past, there was far less talk about “compatibility” and finding the ideal soul-mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.
In John Tierney’s classic humor article “Picky, Picky, Picky” he tries nobly to get us to laugh at the impossible situation our culture has put us in. He recounts many of the reasons his single friends told him they had given up on their recent relationships:
“She mispronounced ‘Goethe.’”
“How could I take him seriously after seeing The Road Less Traveled on his bookshelf?”
“If she would just lose seven pounds.”
“Sure, he’s a partner, but it’s not a big firm. And he wears those short black socks.”
“Well, it started out great … beautiful face, great body, nice smile. Everything was going fine—until she turned around.” He paused ominously and shook his head. ”… She had dirty elbows.”
In other words, some people in our culture want too much out of a marriage partner. They do not see marriage as two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation, a “haven in a heartless world,” as Christopher Lasch describes it. Rather, they are looking for someone who will accept them as they are, complement their abilities and fulfill their sexual and emotional desires. This will indeed require a woman who is “a novelist/astronaut with a background in fashion modeling,” and the equivalent in a man. A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put—today people are asking far too much in the marriage partner.