Happiness in marriage

A Christian Science perspective: Marriage can be the context for learning more of our identity as God's loving and loved expression.

Maybe no other relationship has so many expectations surrounding it as marriage. Most marriage partners hope and expect to be happy. How to be happy is the question. Happiness isn’t an automatic guarantee attached to the marriage license. In fact, looking at the rate of divorce, you may wonder whether marriage has all that much to do with happiness.

Despite such statistics, however, most people who are married – and even many of those who are now divorced – would agree that working together in marriage can be a rich and wonderful experience. It can be a blessing to a family, and to society as well. But happiness, if it is to grow and flourish, has to be built on a solid basis.

The strongest basis for happiness is a spiritual foundation. More than any human relationship, our unbreakable unity with God is the foundation of lasting joy. This joy that we have as a result of our spiritual relationship to God doesn’t depend on whether we are married. It isn’t even dependent on what we may consider our personality, because it is an immortal fact about our true spiritual identity. The real nature of man as God’s likeness is to express God’s own goodness and wholeness. And marriage is an especially good arena where Christly love can be practiced.

If personalities clash and we feel unhappy with ourselves or our spouse, the Love that is God is present to redeem our behavior and feelings. The message of the Bible about love is summed up in I John: “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (4:16). An intuition that both we and our spouse are loved by God can break through the feeling that we just aren’t capable of love. Knowing that God is Love – and that our true identity must express divine Love – brings out resources of patience and unselfish caring that we might not otherwise expect to be capable of. But there they are, turning the everyday routines of living and working together into an image of what true spiritual reality is.

Sometimes dissatisfaction arises because our happiness may be too dependent on pleasures or on circumstances that aren’t very substantial. Then we may need to find that true goodness and virtue are, in the long run, more attractive and important to us. It takes prayer and a deep willingness to change in order to dwell in love, as the Bible describes, because the human personality with its moods, habits, and tastes seems like such an inseparable part of human life. But the spiritual fact of man’s unity with Love, with God, remains, and it enables us to learn lessons, adjust to the demands of marriage, and grow in divine grace.

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, had many experiences with the promises and challenges of marriage. They helped her to speak with authority on matrimony. In “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” she writes: “Experience should be the school of virtue, and human happiness should proceed from man’s highest nature. May Christ, Truth, be present at every bridal altar to turn the water into wine and to give to human life an inspiration by which man’s spiritual and eternal existence may be discerned” (p. 65).

To bring enduring happiness into a marriage, we need to love with the love that God pours forth. Marriage can be the context for learning more of our identity as God’s loving and loved expression. On this foundation, we’ll find true happiness.

Reprinted from the Oct. 1, 1990, issue of The Christian Science Monitor.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Happiness in marriage
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2015/0311/Happiness-in-marriage
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe