Sometimes it seems like our whole culture is aligned against the deep commitments of a marriage that lasts over many years. There are rough patches that can last months, that are just that-rough patches and not the truth of the marriage. There are reasons why you chose that person, that are perhaps deeper than you first thought. With Bruce, my body sang to him, the first night we stood under a tree in Rockton. My body was wiser than all the lists I made out when I prayed, telling God who I was looking for in a husband. Even though his silence can sometimes leave me lonely and reading too much Facebook, I am grateful I didn’t marry a chatterbox.
Well, here’s a perspective I wrote for WNIJ, our local NPR station.
While I was warming up from a walk in the cold, I watched CBS This Morning. The hosts were interviewing Oona Metz, a therapist who’d written Unhitched: an Essential Guide to Divorce. “Divorce is painful at first, but women who divorce find themselves transformed. Women are throwing over thirty, forty-year marriages.” Another time they discussed Strangers, a memoir about marriage heartbreak. CBS gave them ample airtime.
CBS promoting a practice that breaks hearts and spins families apart left me empty, wishing I could watch a story about the transformation that long marriages can bring.Â
Then I opened Substack to Sherman Alexie love poems. (Sherman Alexie is the author of the classic The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the writer/director of The Business of Fancy Dancing.) Here’s part of one called To Be Continued:
“Listen, Listen. Most people
Still want to get married. Most people still want
to have children. We humans are not so different
than hummingbirds and brown bears. I’d often dreamed
of being a groom during my childhood. And now
look at me sharing this house—sharing all these
rooms with my wife and sons. I want my descendants,
the grandchildren of my grandchildren, to study
the old photographs of my face and see their eyes
and nose and hair. I want them to hang family portraits
in their homes and say, “That one there with the big chin,
he’s the tall Indian who loved to write poems.”
I’m Katie Andraski with Sherman Alexie and that’s my perspective. 1 You can find Sherman Alexie at https://shermanalexie.substack.com.
Bruce and I celebrated our fortieth anniversary by going to a greasy spoon out in the country. The place was packed with the local farmers and fun to look at, especially their trucks in the parking lot. I wanted to save calories for chicken marsala and cannoli cake at our local Italian restaurant. The day was gray, with dripping rain. And sad for me. My tears rose like the water running through ditches. Maybe not for you, but these big anniversaries can do this, because there is pressure to be happy, and sometimes the day is gray, the wind is cold, and the argument silent.
I believe the pastor who married us, my spiritual director, and Bruce’s mother when we announced our engagement where concerned our match wasn’t quite made in heaven. Bruce’s pastor noted how difficult it would be for Bruce’s mother for Bruce to move out of her house and told her the choice was hers to make this either a heaven or hell. He asked if Bruce would mind if I made more money than him. I never did. My spiritual director knew about my horrible dating pattern. To him it seemed I was bouncing from one inappropriate man to another because Bruce and I got engaged and married in less than a year. Bruce’s mother nudged Bruce saying, “She’s intelligent.” But I found Bruce is just as intelligent as I’m supposed to be, but his smarts are in his hands. I found we are in step with each other as far as the important things—loving God, loving creation, living simply. I was relieved he was a Lutheran because liturgical worship made sense.
It’s been forty years of blessing each other, learning how to love who is in front of us, not our imagined idea we first fell in love with or who we think our beloved should be. I learned that full frontal conversations did not work. I have learned to leave our marriage in God’s hands because only Jesus is powerful enough to pull him, to pull me out of the grave. In the meantime, we bless each other, and occasionally say the daily office. Like a friend asked her husband to read to her, I have needed Bruce’s voice saying those old words that speak of God’s goodness. Those old words are more than just words, though saying them feels ordinary, maybe even boring.
It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been together longer than my parents have been part of my life, that Bruce has been more family to me than they were able to be, simply because of length of time and faithfulness. As John Behr says in From Adam to Christ:
It is, as we have seen above, in laying down his life that Christ shows us what it is to be God and what it is to be human. Our existence as male and female is in fact the horizon in which we (or at least most of us) learn, through the power of erotic attraction, to lay down our lives for another: through the erotic drive deeply implanted in us by God, we are drawn out of ourselves, to “die” to ourselves and to live our lives in virtue of another. As Dionysius the Areopagite puts it, “The divine erotic force also produces ecstasy, compelling those who love to belong not to themselves but to those whom they love.” In marriage, then, male s and females are, quite literally, “human-ized”!2
In another place, Behr says, “Marriage becomes a form of martyrdom as we learn to die for ourselves and live for another.”3 Remember it’s martyrs who are held in high honor in heaven:
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
    and the kingdom of our God,
    and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
    who accuses them before our God day and night,
    has been hurled down.
11 They triumphed over him
    by the blood of the Lamb
    and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
    as to shrink from death.
12Â Therefore rejoice, you heavens
    and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
    because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
    because he knows that his time is short.”4
While I know this talks about believers literally dying for the Lord, sometimes brutally, I think it can apply to us, as we learn to die before we die, in the crucible of a marriage, with another imperfect, quirky human, our love calling us to become truly human as Jesus became in his life, death and resurrection. I have seen this with Bruce’s willingness to serve me. I used to feel uneasy about this because the therapists would say he should develop his own life, but maybe doing chores and making dinner is how he wants to live.
During a recent rough patch, a friend said we should see a counselor because ways we relate sometimes devolve into dusty roads that go nowhere and they hurt. She didn’t want to see me hurt. Yes those roads sometimes lead us to oak groves, trees too big to cut down, that we thread our way through. Sometimes we sit down and lean our backs against them. Sometimes the woodland sweats, the leaves green and thick. Sometimes we walk along a logging road we cleared, to harvest lumber to build furniture and warm our home.Â
When we renovated our house, when our university endured a mass shooting, when I’d hit my head on black ice, the world swimming, and I was shattered, we tried marriage counseling. It wasn’t long before I fired the counselor, even though we were fighting. A carpenter who worked on our house said each marriage has its own ecology, its own character. Trying to fit that marriage into what a counselor thinks is healthy, is not necessarily what is healthy for the marriage.Â
During that time, I found Dr. Fred Luskin’s Forgive for Love and grabbed ahold of his advice.
You need to appreciate your partner in three different ways, in order to truly foster forgiveness between the two of you. The first way is to recognize the specific good your lover does for you. Look for all the ways, both big and small, in which your lover serves you and makes your life better…
The second way to appreciate our lovers is to look for the good they do in the world by acknowledging the help they give to other people…
The third way to appreciate our lovers is to look for and praise their good qualities by telling them how much we admire how they think, behave and react. We need to appreciate the everyday good qualities that often go unnoticed like honesty, thrift, gentleness, courage and kindness.5
Sometimes when the rough patches like a tangle of raspberry bushes, burdocks, and weeds wrapped around my legs and stuck to my arms, I’ve asked for prayer from Majik and his wife. Their prayers have been particularly powerful in Bruce’s and my life. They’ve cut away the tangle. We speak simple words to God, and He works more powerfully than we can imagine.
Stephen Robinson’s Stealing Paradise, an essay about deathbed conversions versus long lived conversions was like a hose clearing the mud off my feet.
So, the metaphorical reality of salvation for most of us is more like living out a passionately begun, illusion lost, knuckle down, gut it out, joy and sorrow, love/hate, war and peace, willful, stubborn perseverance of a long haul, daily same-old-same-old, hill and valley, fifty-year marriage relationship. That is a lot different “work” than a last ditch, desperate “Hail Mary” when you have no other options but to go for it, hell or high water… and by the grace of God he catches your toss and you “win”. Then, to boot, you are made a saint by the church for it!5
A few paragraphs later he says,
In the end salvation is as simple (and as hard) as this: Learning humility to accept the love of God as a gift whether it takes fifty years of tedious, monotonous, repetitive, uninspiring existence or a dramatic, revelatory, tragic moment of desperation.5
When I walked this week, I saw water had stopped running in the culvert, water that had begun in the neighbor’s field and run across ours, when it was a gully washer, washing the neighbor’s precious dirt into our hay and not so precious field trash. But now it had become quiet. Bright green grass has grown up around the trash, grass that had been nourished by lightning, that releases nitrogen. The red wing blackbirds chattered. They watched from twigs as the dogs and I walked by. A few killdeer trotted across the field. I know these birds are ordinary, but there’s something of the glow about them too, their lives in themselves, miraculous and joyous.
Our neighbor stopped by with a pot full of cut flowers and a box of rhubarb. Her five-year-old son was proud that he’d helped cut them. This is old fashioned neighboring–the simple love your neighbor we are called to do, and a way to resist the trend these days to bury our noses in our phones and invest only in online friendship. She couldn’t have known how badly I wanted cut flowers these last weeks. There is something of the sacred in these simple gifts and conversation.
Bruce and I took our first bike ride of the season and rode a little past our neighbor’s cattle farm. What a beautiful crop of black angus calves his “ladies” gave him. He said his calves are worth a thousand dollars apiece right now. I wonder if it’s because Nebraska’s grasslands are on fire, and cattle ranches are being burned up. It’s shocking this has not been in the national news, where even the tornado whacking Lena was covered by in person reporters.
Later when we drove to town, we saw an eagle sitting on a lone, dead tree, looking at the calves. Our neighbor was working by road, so we stopped, pointing out the eagle. “Are they watching for the calves?” “They’ve been hanging around, but no they won’t get them.”
References
1 Katie Andraski. Perspective: Marriage. https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-perspectives/2026-03-31/perspective-marriage
2 John Behr. From Adam to Christ. From Male and Female to Becoming Human. https://thepocketscroll.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/7a129-issue23133a14behr.pdf2510 Dionysius, On theDivine Names 4.13,trans. as Maximus the Confessor, FifthCentury on Various Texts 85, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, ed. and trans. G. E. H.Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and KallistosWare (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 281.2
3 Orthodox Christians of Constaninople’s Post. https://www.facebook.com/christianorthodoxia/posts/%EF%B8%8Fmarriage-becomes-a-form-of-martyrdom-as-we-learn-to-die-for-ourselves-and-live-/1144710561028034/
4 Revelation 12: 10 -12, NIV
5 Fred Lufkin. Forgive for Love. Harper Collins. pp. 136-139
6 Steve Robinson. Stealing Paradise. https://substack.com/home/post/p-160164713
If you’d like to subscribe to these essays, click here. If you’d like to leave a tip, click here.