This year, Christmas Eve falls on the fourth Sunday of Advent, when Christians preparing to celebrate the Incarnation with the aid of an Advent wreath light the candle representing love. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. This purple “angel’s candle” recalls both Gabriel’s annunciation to the mother of God and the celestial choir’s visitation of the shepherds. The message has been delivered—divine love, a divine light in this present darkness—and its promise will be fulfilled this very night.
Christmas Eve this year also happens to mark six months of marriage for me and my wife. Of course every new half-year of married life for us will coincide with a Christmas Eve, but this first one, before anniversaries and their conventions, feels fit for acknowledgement—a small ebenezer to the distance already come.
Love is all grace, or grace is all love; we celebrate that this Christmas Eve. And earthly love is grace too, and grace on earth often looks like luck.
“You’re lucky,” my wife and I have been told, often. The tellers are happy for us, but sometimes there is a spoken or silent “just” there, as in “you’re just lucky (and don’t judge me, who am less happy than you).” This accusation comes most usually from the discontentedly single, who are tired of the well-intentioned but inane dating advice of their married friends. And it is frustrating, in my own relatively recent experience, to be told that if only you would copy exactly what they did in a time and place and social context not your own, then the difficulties of finding a spouse would disappear and all would go according to plan.
They are right. We were lucky. We continue to be lucky. The particulars can never be repeated and a lot of the generic advice is too abstract to be helpful. The causes of the decline in marriage are complex and multitudinous and the dating scene is depressing. So much so that married people comparing their honorable estate to the last helicopter out of Saigon has become a cliché. Marriage is a high-risk bet on future happiness.
But you can make your own luck.
I will risk something like advice here. I say “like advice,” because this is reaction, not instruction—an apology like that of Socrates, a defense against accusers that is almost certain to condemn me instead. For there really is an accusation in remarks to the effect of “you’re just lucky,” as much as self-exculpation. It puts agency on trial, and suggests that contrary to what my wife and I might think, we didn’t do anything to get here, happy.
We worked rather hard for this luck. Audentes Fortuna juvat. As I reflect on six months of marriage, and thus its foundation in two years of dating, and all our lives before that, I must conclude that it does no one any good to pretend that love is any more a matter of chance than other lucky breaks in life. Carpe diem. What you experience as chance rules everything around you. Fortune’s wheel turns for us all and our choice is how to meet it. The paradox here is the same paradox that lets you get out of bed in the morning.
If you want to get married, become marriageable. Day by day, become the kind of person that someone you would like to marry would marry. Date only people you could consider marrying. Play the cards you’re dealt as best you can. Fold often and conserve your chips. And then, when you find someone, make a vow before God, mutually assured it’s a murder-suicide situation. It is all you can do. It is not easy. It is no guarantee. My wife and I almost met some two months early; we were at the same party and I noticed her across the lawn, but she left before I could introduce myself. It wouldn’t have worked then. When we did meet later, with the help of friends and family, we were both ready to think about going all in.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for your indulgence, for your patience with the scattered Advent musings of a lovesotted new husband. The only thing really to recommend any of the above is that it’s shorter than an Austen novel; Jane said all of it better first, in detail, without risk of pride. Happiness is found in virtue; that is, in choices and habits. Each new day will bring its challenges, and each new day will be a gift. This made luck of ours is all grace, our mortal selves upheld in marriage covenant by the same power as moves the spheres of heaven. There are angels here in this life, too, messengers dressed in nurse’s scrubs announcing good tidings of great joy: God has so loved us, that He has given us a daughter on Her way.
We love because He first loved us. Hither by His help we’ve come. Advent is ending. Come, thou fount of every blessing, helpless babe for helpless humanity. Merry Christmas, dear friends.
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