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Monday, February 16, 2004
Marriage begins at home
By Orlando P. Carvajal
Uncut gems
LIKE everything else...
Statistically, January has the most weddings. The perception, however, is that June is the wedding month. I will go with the perception and write just one more time in June about marriage.
The reason for the choice of topic is another set of statistics that claims there are far too many failed marriages than is desirable. Many more marriages have downgraded themselves into arrangements of practical convenience devoid of any love relationship.
Ironically, as problematic as marriage is in modern-day living, we cannot go to any school to prepare to make a success of this particular human endeavor. One can hardly call either as adequate preparation the pre-cana conferences that the Catholic Church requires before solemnizing a marriage.
The long and short of it is we have all to pick up along the way whatever ideas and attitudes we have about marriage. The bottom line is that what we see in the marriage of our parents is what we get. Hence, statistics also have it that, with of course some happy exceptions to prove the rule, children from failed marriages have a high probability of ending up in one themselves.
The home, therefore, is the training ground for future successful marriages of the next generation. If life is a struggle to be true to one’s purpose, marriage is also a lifetime (until death do us part, remember?) struggle to achieve union. There are really no successful marriages. There are only marriages that are succeeding.
Succeeding because the parties continue to struggle to look for loving and compassionate solutions to whatever problems they face in their marriage. This is the way of the sacred self. This is the spiritual solution to all relationship problems. This is the all-important lesson one must learn in order to have a marriage that is succeeding.
The opposite is the false ego’s approach to marriage. When a marriage hits the rocks, one can be sure that the false ego dashed it there with such unloving and uncompassionate attitudes (by any one or both partners) as controlling and winning, getting even, being jealous, not forgiving, etc.
No union can be achieved by the false self for, as we can see, no union is possible with those negative emotions I just mentioned.
Home is where the heart is. Home is where one learns how to love. To be more precise, home is where one learns to wrestle with the false ego and strive to look for loving and compassionate solutions to all human relationship problems.
Home is the beginning of an endless marital union.
(February 16, 2004 issue)
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