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The Power of CommitmentReflections on Our First Year of MarriageRev. Diane Berke A
wedding anniversary is the celebration of On May 19, 1997, Tony and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary .Being married - even being happily married - for one year certainly makes me no expert or authority on marriage. Yet the year has been a time of such incredible and rewarding learning and growth for me that I wanted to articulate my reflections on it for myself, and to share them with you as well. The first thing I realized when I sat down to gather my thoughts is that I love being married to Tony! Our marriage is one of the best decisions and greatest blessings of my life. That doesn't mean, however, that my ego is always happy in the relationship. Nor has it been an easy year for us. The challenges we have faced have not been so much between us, or within our relationship. Rather, they've been challenges that life has presented to us, individually and collectively. At times during the past year I have felt like I was on a spiritual "Outward Bound" program, where I needed to develop and exercise spiritual muscles I didn't know I had. Or like I was working with a spiritual personal trainer who kept diligently stretching me just beyond what I considered the limits of my own strength and ability .Yet despite the difficulties and challenges, there has not been a single day that I have not felt blessed to have Tony in my life. I have been grateful every day for our marriage, for the opportunity it affords me to stretch and grow and deepen in my capacity to understand, experience, and express genuine devotion and love. And I would not trade that gift for anything in the world. Perhaps the most important learning for me this year has been the tremendous healing power, the transformative power, of commitment. And that is the heart of what I want to share with you. The Power and Freedom of Commitment
There is no difficulty that enough love will not
conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love
will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough
love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem. On our wedding day, Tony and I pledged to each other: "I will place my trust in the goodness of your heart, the holiness of our union, and the healing, transforming power of commitment and love." We have renewed this pledge, and the whole of our vows, every day since. And I have come to understand and appreciate the meaning of these words in a much deeper way. For many people, it seems, the word commitment has become fraught with fear. It conjures up images of sacrifice, imprisonment, loss of freedom, and the diminishing of possibilities and choices. If we're really honest with ourselves, what many of us hope for in a "committed relationship" is that another person will be committed to us while we reserve the right to keep the back door open for ourselves. This is true, not only of how we think of commitment in our relationships, but in many other things as well -for instance, when we think of committing fully to a spiritual path, to our work, and so on. We somehow feel safer "dabbling," splashing around near the surface of things, than we do taking that deep breath and diving really deep. We hold back a part of ourselves, we withhold a part of our own life force. Somehow the idea of "keeping our options open" gives us an illusion of freedom. But what really happens is that we deny ourselves the true freedom and joy that come only with the experience of being wholehearted. Some years ago I read a passage by one of the medieval women mystics (I believe it was Mechtild of Magdeburg, though I'm not certain) which really resonated for me. She wrote that the one true joy is simply this: that the creature puts her whole heart into what she is doing. Similarly, the Course teaches that to be wholehearted is to be happy (T-5.Intro.2:1). To be wholehearted is to transcend inner conflict, to align completely with the truth within ourselves. That state of mind and heart is the only place where we can be truly at home, deeply at peace, fully alive. It allows us a glimpse of remembrance of who and what we really are. True commitment is the experience of wholeheartedness. What I have understood intellectually for a long time, but which I have been learning in a much deeper and more experiential way this year, is that true freedom and genuine empowerment come only with full and total commitment. I first discovered this in an interesting way many years ago. When I was in my twenties, I was a ballroom and Latin dancer. While I was never a professional dancer, I competed as an amateur on a national level, and sometimes spent as much as twenty hours a week dancing. It was an extraordinary classroom for me, full of rich and wonderful lessons, not only about dance, but about life itself. One of the most important of these had to do with a deeper insight into commitment. Ballroom dancing is based on natural walking movements, and much of the mastery of that dance form has to do with the way you transfer your weight from one foot to the other. My teachers were always saying, "Commit your weight fully to one foot." The challenge of that lies in the fact that it feels safer and more secure to straddle, to divide our weight between both feet. How often does life also feel like that? How often do we feel safer keeping one foot in and one foot out of many things in our lives? The problem, though, is that when we're in that position, we cannot move. When we're straddling our weight, we are, in fact, stuck. Only as we shift our weight to one foot can we begin to move. And only when we're willing to commit our weight wholly to one foot do we have complete freedom of movement and possibility. What I learned as a dancer, what I came to recognize and understand in a deep kinesthetic way, was this simple truth: Total commitment is total freedom. Total commitment is the most empowering, freeing, joyful, and ennobling experience we can have in this world. The opportunity to relearn this principle -the chance to put it into practice in tangible ways day by day with another human being and rediscover the living truth of it -has been for me one of the most precious gifts of this first year of marriage. Commitment to What? Obviously, a true marriage is an expression of commitment, hopefully a full commitment. But the question is, commitment to what? This question seems to me to be the real heart of the matter. Several months ago, it struck me that the ego also makes a commitment in its special relationships. The Course describes this in terms of the ego's cardinal rule: "Seek and do not find." The fundamental commitment of the ego in relationships is this: "In this relationship I will forget who lam -and blame you for that." And the ego can be quite powerfully committed to that. In fact, it occurred to me that the ego has an entire set of vows for its special love relationships. The "VOWS" of the Special Love Relationship 1. I vow to turn you into a symbol of my guilt (lack of wholeness), and to use you to justify my decision to forget who I really am. 2. I vow to make you into an idol -to see you as the source of my happiness, security, sense of well-being, sense of worth, and peace. 3. I therefore vow to blame you for any feelings of unworthiness, insecurity, lack of fulfillment, anger, and discontent that I feel. 4. I vow to use our relationship to practice and perfect my skills of judgment, projection, and giving to get, and to reinforce my perception of myself as lacking, powerless, and a victim. 5. I vow to make the form of our relationship more important than its content and to focus my energy and attention on whether or not you are living up to my expectations and demands and meeting my needs as I have defined them. 6. As long as you fulfill the demands and desires of my ego, I will love you and be nice to you. When you don't, I will feel justified in criticizing and attacking you, manipulating you, and trying to change or control you. 7. I vow to use our relationship to reinforce my belief that safety lies in separation, secrets, defensiveness, and attack. 8. I vow to emerge from our relationship more angry, despairing, cynical, defensive, hopeless, and convinced of my guilt and unworthiness (and/or yours) than when I entered it. For most of us, if we're really honest with ourselves, this list describes much of how we have operated in our relationships. Insanely, we have believed we could find love and lasting happiness this way. But of course, it has never worked. And it never will. The commitment we are talking about - the commitment in a genuine marriage - is entirely different from this. It is, rather, a commitment to the remembrance of our holiness, our innocence, our essence which is love. Commitment to Holiness One of the things that initially drew Tony and me together, a deep foundation we discovered that we shared, was a longing we both felt to experience devotion - to learn and express what it means to be truly devoted to another human being. Certainly, many parents experience real devotion in relationship to their children - as Tony does with his daughter Beth. She has a place in his heart that is unshakable. But to experience devotion toward someone whom you cannot so easily see as part of yourself - toward someone you initially see as separate from you, as "other" - is perhaps the greatest challenge of human relationship. It is the process of learning to truly love another as yourself. The definition of devotion that resonates most strongly for me is the one offered by Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. True devotion, he says, can never be to the personality, the ego, of another. Rather, true devotion is "an unbroken receptivity to the truth." In each of our relationships, in each moment of relationship, we reflect back to one another an image of ourselves, we teach each other what we are. We either reinforce the ego insanity we've all bought into, or we help each other remember the truth. The Course states that "devotion to a brother cannot set you back" (T-4.Intro.l:3). The choice to be continually open and receptive to seeing, recognizing, remembering the truth of who a brother is, can never be anything other than a gift to ourselves. Honoring the truth in another, we remember and claim the truth in ourselves. This is the healing power and potential in every relationship in our lives. This is the choice that transforms our special relationships into holy ones. To me, this is the essence of the real commitment we make in marriage -the commitment to marriage as a living expression of what the Course calls the holy relationship. Such a commitment is not a commitment to form. There is nothing inherently holy or sacred about two bodies simply staying together under the same roof. We have all seen many such loveless arrangements, and witnessed how empty and painful they are for everyone involved. Rather the commitment to marriage as a holy relationship is a commitment to love, a commitment to remembering the truth about ourselves and our partner, each and every time we are tempted to forget. Someone once said that a good marriage is the union of two good forgivers. And I have come to really appreciate that the commitment in marriage -or in any relationship we would experience and know as holy -is the commitment to forgiveness in the deepest and truest and most transformative meaning of the word. Just as there seem to be a set of "vows" for the special love relationship, there are also vows that I see as fundamental to the holy relationship. The Vows of the Holy Relationship 1. In this relationship, I vow to remember the truth of who I am and who you are, even when you forget. 2. I vow not to blame you for the pain and fear that result in my experience when I decide instead to forget. 3. I vow to remember that my happiness, well-being, and peace can be found only in my own decision to choose forgiveness and love and not in whether or not you live up to the demands and desires of my ego. 4. I vow to use our relationship as a place to learn forgiveness and to undo my investment in separation and guilt. 5. I vow to learn that your happiness and peace are my own, and that in my choice to love instead of judge, I am healed and given everything I could ever truly want. 6. I vow to honor my Self in our relationship by accepting responsibility for my own experience and by acknowledging and exercising my power to "choose again." 7 .I vow to help you remember who you are by being a clear mirror for your innocence and light. 8. I vow to love you through any changes in form that may occur in our relationship over time. Total Commitment in All Relationships The Course teaches that to the Holy Spirit, every relationship is a total commitment (T-15.VI.1:3) - a total commitment to seeing the truth, a total commitment to forgiveness and healing and love. Yet in no way do these commitments contradict or conflict with each other. In fact, the commitment to love in one relationship actually supports our commitment to love in all of our relationships. The commitment we make in a true marriage is, in that sense, no different than the commitment we can make in any and all of our relationships: Here I will learn to love. Here I will practice remembering who I am by choosing again and again to see the truth in you. Here I will learn that what I offer you, I give to myself. Here I will learn, and come to trust, that my happiness and peace lie in my choice to open my heart to your innocence and my own. Here I will learn that when I choose to love rather than judge, all the gifts of Heaven are given me. What does make marriage "different," in a sense, is that we make our commitment consciously and clearly. The public nature of the commitment also carries, I believe, great symbolic meaning and power for us. But we can make the same conscious commitment to forgiveness and love in our other relationships as well. I had the opportunity to experience this in a very direct and powerful way this year with my stepdaughter. When Tony and I decided to marry, I realized that I wanted to make as strong and clear a commitment to Beth as I was making to her father. I appreciated and valued the relationship we had developed, and it meant a great deal to both Tony and me that she served as maid of honor at our wedding. Although Beth is in her mid-twenties, our marriage meant some real changes in her life, both practically and psychologically. One of the most difficult for her was our turning what had been her childhood bedroom into a combination guest room and office space for me. Despite the fact that she was no longer living in the apartment, it was understandably painful to her to no longer have her own room there. Emotionally, she felt like she had been displaced, pushed out. She was angry with her father and completely severed her relationship with me. My ego had a field day with this scenario. I felt hurt and unfairly blamed. And I was very aware of the temptation to retaliate in some way -to put Tony in the middle so that he would somehow have to "choose between" the two of us. But, fortunately, even in the midst of my reactivity, I knew that that was not what I truly wanted. Instead, I consciously made the decision that I would keep my heart open to Beth - no matter what. I decided that if she ever wanted to reconcile, I would be completely available and open to relationship. And I made the choice to remember the truth of the love between us, despite the seeming estrangement that was taking place. I reminded myself of these choices and decisions again and again, whenever I was tempted into ego reactions. And I began, every morning in my mind, to say the same vows that Tony and I say to each other to Beth. I did not feel guided to address what was going on in any outward sense. Rather I felt that I needed simply to do my own inner work -to make a firm and unconditional commitment to love and healing in this relationship in my own heart and mind. At the time, I did not know when, or even if, there would be a reconciliation in our relationship. But a few weeks later we ran into each other unexpectedly, and the distance between us simply began to dissolve. It felt like a true miracle, and I was so grateful. Within a short time, the relationship felt fully healed and we have continued to grow closer ever since. Commitment as Practice Perhaps the most meaningful of the vows Tony and I say to each other, in a practical sense, is this: "1 will keep my heart open through any doubt, anger, fear or pain that may arise, and I will always come back to love as quickly as I can." Holy relationship is a process, not a thing. It is quite apparent to me that I will forget who I am over and over and over again. And I will forget who Tony is, over and over and over again. But my commitment is that every time I choose judgment, every time I choose fear, every time I choose separation, every time I choose attack, I will notice what I've done and I will remember to come back to lo'(~. I won't stay in insanity any longer than I need to. I will always come back to love as quickly as I can. One of the most important learnings of this year for me has been that it is in the small moments, the small decisions we make every day, that the commitment to love is made real. I listened to an incredible talk recently by Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit. In it she suggested that we need to strive to be "spiritually anonymous." Often we get caught up in wanting to make big choices, large, public gestures and expressions of our spirituality and our desire to contribute. But what really counts, she points out, are the choices we make in all those small things -the choices that no one may ever know about except, perhaps, the people right in front of us, the people sitting across from us at the dinner table. In April Tony and I lost our dog Wally. We loved him dearly, and he had been an incredible teacher to us. After he died, I realized that one of the things I missed most about him was the way he would greet us when we would come home after being out. He was always so happy to see us, and was completely unabashed about showing it' He would get this big, goofy smile on his face, and he would wag, not just his tail, but his whole body. It was as if he was saying, in the most animated way possible, "I am so glad to see you!!!" I loved being on the receiving end of Wally's love and affection. I also loved seeing Tony be the recipient of it, and seeing the happiness it always brought him. After Wally was gone, it occurred on me -"How come I don't greet Tony that way? Why should I be any less expressive of my love for my husband, and my joy in our being together, than Wally had been?" For me, it is remembering and putting into practice those kinds of little things that make a big difference in the quality of our relationship. A woman who had been happily married for fifty years had this to say about her relationship with her husband:
I feel so lucky and so blessed. After fifty
years of marriage, I look around me and see so few relationships that last with
any fun, fire, and passion. So many times, people have asked us what our secret
is, and I am always at a loss about how to respond. It has always been easy. I
have heard my husband insist that he could never do enough to repay me for my
kindness and understanding to him and it always amazes me, because I am just as
convinced that it is I who can never do enough to repay him. If I had to explain
the success of our relationship very simply, I guess I would have to say that we
are very kind to each other, every day, in every way possible. Tony and I have both discovered this year that practicing the commitment to love, kindness, forgiveness and healing in our marriage helps us to be more conscious of that same possibility in all of our relationships. Relationships with our parents, with our children, with our friends can all be rich in the rewards that come from genuine commitment. What heals us, what transforms us, is making a wholehearted commitment to love, and not the particular form of relationship in which we make it. You may want to take a moment right now to think of one relationship in your life where you would like to experience full healing and true holiness, but where up till now you have been trying to "straddle the fence" - trying to compromise somehow between the choice to love and the choice to judge, between the purpose of healing and the goals of the ego. And ask yourself if you are willing, right now, in your own heart, to make a commitment to love. Not a commitment to form, but a commitment to truth, a commitment to healing, a commitment to remembering who you and this other person really are and have always been. Whether you are ready to make this commitment now or not, remember that it is always possible. In a sense, the true marriage, the true union, is within ourselves. It is our own joining with the love that we are, with the spirit and truth within us. From that inner union, we realize that we are already joined with the love and spirit in everyone. Whether in outer form you are married or single, I invite you to enter with me that deeper spirit of marriage - to make the wholehearted commitment in your life to love. It will be a gift to yourself, to everyone in your life, to all the world. Our Marriage as a Gift to the World Since our wedding day - now over a year ago - Tony and I have spoken our vows to each other every day. It has become a profound and powerful spiritual practice for us, reminding and recommitting ourselves daily to our highest aspirations for our marriage. It has helped us to stay mindful of what really matters to us, of what each of us wants to bring to this relationship. There have been times when one or both of us have felt resistant to saying these words -times when, after an argument or disagreement, it seemed that saying them would have been empty at best, a hypocritical lie at worst. But happily, at each of these times, one of us (most often Tony) has been able to gently suggest putting everything else aside for a moment and speaking our vows. And happily, the other has found enough sanity in that moment to agree. Inevitably, by the time we are a third of the way through, we have found our way back to the place of truth inside ourselves that really means the words we are saying. And in that reconnection is always healing and peace. It seems fitting to close my reflections on our first year of marriage by sharing our vows with you. Beloved, before God and our loved ones, I make these vows: I will hold you gently in my heart all of my life. I will seek your happiness and peace as my own. I will cherish and protect your trust as the precious gift that it is. I will remember always the truth of who you are, and I will strive to be a clear mirror for your beauty, wholeness, and innocence. I will be honest with you and faithful to you in word, thought, and deed, and / will listen to you with an understanding heart and spacious mind. I will keep my heart open through any doubt, anger, fear or pain that may arise, and I will always come back to love as quickly as / can. I will be a true and loyal friend to you through all that life may bring. And I will trust always in the goodness of your heart, the holiness of our union, and the healing, transforming power of commitment and love. With a clear mind, an open, joyful heart, and each breath of my life, I commit to you. May our marriage be the gift to the world that your love has been to me. My sincere hope is that, through this sharing, our marriage is a gift to you, as it has been to us. Blessings, Diane Published in On Course –Inspiration For The Inner Journey- Magazine, Vol. IX No. 7 - Issue 242 - July 1997 On Marriage ~
The greatest of all arts is the art of living
together.
A happy marriage is a long conversation that
always seems too short.
The goal in marriage is not to think alike,
but to think together.
You don't marry one person; you marry three;
the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are
going to be as a result of being married to you.
Marriage should; I think, always be a little
hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into
another world; and a bigger one.
A successful marriage requires falling in
love many times, always with the same person.
Getting married is easy. Staying married is
more difficult.
In every marriage more than a week old; there
are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find; and continue to find; grounds for
marriage.
Some writers say that love is concerned only
with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar.
How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories
come after the wedding, not before.
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