holy or happy?

When Emily and I were married, twenty-plus years ago, some good friends gave us a Christian book on marriage as a wedding present. In the first few years of our marriage we read through it at least twice, and still to this day we apply a number of the principles that we learned from it. The overall premise of the book is that God’s design for marriage is not to make us happy, but to make us holy.

One of the points that the author makes is that we tend to think of the pursuit of holiness as an endeavor exclusive to the spiritual elite—to those who have taken monastic vows and spend their days in prayer and contemplation. However, as the letter to the Hebrews plainly states, all of us are called to “pursue the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Moreover, there is no small irony in the fact that marriage is actually much better suited to the pursuit of holiness than the cloistered life of celibacy.

One reason for this is that true holiness is acquired through the “mortification” of our fleshly—i.e., our self-seeking, self-indulging, self-focused—primal tendencies and by the cultivation of virtues such as patience, kindness, and gentleness. The quiet, contemplative life makes it all too easy to deceive oneself into thinking that one has acquired these virtues, when in reality the quietness of the monastic lifestyle has simply removed most sources of conflict and stress. True holiness better learned when one’s spouse forgets one’s birthday or stays out too late with the boys at an inopportune time or when one of the children vomits on the brand new carpet at 3:00am the night before a make-or-break performance review at the office.

This idea is obviously very Protestant and is one of the reasons why Martin Luther and the other reformers renounced clerical celibacy. How can you expect your priests or pastors to understand truly the challenges you and your spouse are facing if they have never experienced the joys of marriage themselves? (To be fair, the ideal in the Roman Catholic tradition is that the priest is spiritually “married” to Christ and to the Church and, in imitation of Christ’s self-sacrificing love for his “Bride” [the Church], gives of himself to his local parish. In the ordo amoris, one’s responsibility for one’s family comes first, and so Protestant clergy are more limited in their ability to give of themselves fully to their parishes. But it’s in human limitations where God really gets to work.)

At the same time, the notion that marriage is a “school of character” whose primary purpose is to make us holy can be taken too far.

And the truth is, God really does want us to be happy.

But it’s a happiness that is founded not on our earthly circumstances, but on our relationship with our Creator (which, to be sure, involves our earthly circumstances). A deep happiness that, in biblical terms, is known as “blessedness” and “joy.”

“Blessed [i.e., happy] are the poor.” Not “blessed will be the poor,” but “blessed are they.” Or in Pauline language: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Easier said than done, Paul! But this is nevertheless the ideal for which we are to aim.)

For me, the most foundational affirmations of God’s benevolence are in two of Jesus’ statements of purpose in the Gospel of John:

“I came that [you] may have life and have it abundantly”; and “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” Abundant life and complete joy—which are one and the same—this is why the Word was made flesh. This is God’s will for your life.

But the completion of this divine joy within us is a process—one that can be painful. For as we heard this past Sunday, the call to follow Jesus is a call to take up our cross. And yet the promise is that if we lose our lives for Jesus’ sake—for the sake of the embodiment of divine love—we will, in the end (and even before the end), find them.