Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. Sometimes surprises can be fun. A little variety — the spontaneous outing or present, the out-of-the-blue card or letter, the date night that he planned and arranged for the babysitter all by himself. Other surprises are much less so. Today, for example, we think of tax returns and their orderly rows of numbers, and our fervent hope that not to receive a criptic response from the IRS, who tend to frown on unexpected deviations and variations. Or, take an example from my college years: on Mondays, the lunch menu always featured a single descriptor: “variety.”  This was code for a surplus of a particular dish that had moved […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. (Have you got it memorized yet?) If you’ve been waiting to see what I was going to do with my original keyword (“underwear”), perhaps you are disappointed to see that the keyword has changed. Quite frankly, it occurred to me that — however true my original thought, that the state of our underwear drawer reveals something about how we regard marital intimacy — I still have a bit of work to do in this department, myself. So … I changed the keyword to understanding. In the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:3-9), a farmer strides along, scattering seed haphazardly along his […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. This season of “Army Wives” is hard to watch. Jeremy, the soldier son of one of the military wives, is killed while on deployment in Afghanistan. He had never seen his baby sister, and left behind a fiance — he was taken in the full bloom of youth. The storyline reminds me of my friend Johnnette, whose son was killed in a car accident shortly after returning from deployment in Iraq; her husband Tony died about a year later of a brain tumor.  Other, less traumatic but no less serious, crisis transpired between these two events, and more than […]

In her lovely book on marriage, By Love Refined (p. 187), Dr. Alice von Hildebrand observes with characteristic candor:  “In too many marriages, the husband is so absorbed in his career that he pays less and less attention to his wife . . . . In such marriages, one unfortunate consequence is that the only time the husbands look at their wives is in the bedroom. They view physical intimacy as a relaxation which enables them to work better the next day. Finally, the relationship between such spouses is reduced to watching TV and sleeping together. What a tragic impoverishment of human life and a maiming […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. We were sitting in our favorite diner after church, the kids busily scribbling with crayons on their placemats and kicking each other under the table. As much to make conversation as anything, I told Craig that I was writing about “respect” for one of the challenges, and asked him, “So what do YOU think it means, to ‘respect’ your spouse?” The “deer in the headlights” look on Craig’s face made me rephrase the question immediately. “I mean … can you think of anything I do, or you would like me to do, to make you feel respected?”  He relaxed, but just barely. Finally […]