You talk about the need for marriages to die, and the death of marriages as an appropriate and important step. What does that mean?
What I’m getting at there is, theologically, the whole idea that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it cannot bear fruit. In every area of life, there’s a death-to-life cycle--except in San Francisco where you don’t have seasons. That’s the case in marriages, too, and we often go into marriages deeply afraid of the hard conversations in large part because we’re afraid of what might happen if we go there.
A lot of younger couples marry each other’s best version of themselves with great optimism; the false self is very alluring. But what I mean by dying is that our earlier version of what marriage should have been--our early version of what we thought our spouse should be--needs to die so that we can grow into the larger dream that God has for us. God has to shatter the smaller dreams so that we can get to the bigger dreams of flourishing in our marriage. The marriages that resist that natural dying are where people actually stumble and struggle.
What does a flourishing marriage look like? If I were to look at one, what would I see?
You can talk about flourishing in a few different ways. One of the things I like to emphasize is that we’re made in the image of a relational God, a Trinitarian God, and there’s this wonderful old theological word, perichoresis, which gets at the divine dance. We’re made for divine dance, and so to flourish is to exist in this wonderful dance with one another.
Oftentimes at a marriage retreat, when I name this for people, they know the times in their marriage when they’ve been dancing and they know when they’ve tripped over one another’s feet. Relational intimacy can be obstructed by of any number of different things: the busyness of life, the baggage of our past--particularly the relational baggage of our past--causes us to avoid one another, causes us to fall back into old relational strategies that keep us from the dance.
Another aspect closely related to flourishing is the whole idea of union. Union thrives in the context of longing and desire, and there’s something really mystical about that. We’re made for deep connection, and in our culture today there are so many substitute connections, substitute forms of union, that people experience tastes of transcendence in all sorts of ways other than the intimacy of union with a marriage partner. To flourish in one sense is to forsake other unions, other sources of transcendence and connection.
Who is this seminar for and what will the day look like?
We’ve said that this day is for couples exploring marriage and couples who are married, but we also welcome singles who want to explore what a healthy marriage looks like. It’s not for anyone in any particular kind of marriage, but for people who are looking to grow in their understanding and experience of intimacy and marriage.
There are two sessions during the day. In the first session, I’ll do some deconstruction work. We’ll talk about some of the major stumbling blocks of marriage. In the second one, I’ll paint a picture of what it means for marriage to flourish. We’ll also have time for some processing at the retreat, and there will be optional follow-up once folks get back in the form of 5-week study groups.
We hear so much about developing good communication in marriage, but you emphasize the importance of connection. What’s the difference?
This is a big deal for me. The best research in the last ten to fifteen years on marriage really emphasizes connection. We would say Biblically we’re made for connection with God, but what we’ve found is that neurologically we’re also made for connection. For good brain function, we need strong attachment from the very beginning--really from conception on. We can perceive relational detachment in the womb. This is just good science, so what’s pretty crucial is for us to pay attention to the ways in which we learn to attach in our marriages, the way we learned to do relationship in our families, so we can better understand how to exist in our relationship today. You can learn communication skills and still miss connection. I can have a conversation with my wife that’s helpful--talking about finances, say--but never really connect. Researchers have found that connection is a reliable gauge of sustainability in marriage. Communication tools are like casts on a broken arm--they’re important and play a functionally important role, but the real deep work is in fostering connection.