When I was driving home from Mass the other day, I was thinking about marriage, about how we sometimes want a solution to be THE solution to our problems. Like there is one recipe…follow these directions and you will end up with the perfect marriage.
But alas, that is not the case, every marriage is as different as the people joined together in the Sacrement. We all have our own gifts, baggage and stories which when mixed together can create a lot of beauty or a lot of problems.
So, my thoughts stayed with colors…what are the colors of marriage then, and God prompted me to think of Mary and St. Joseph, blue and brown. God did not have to place Mary into a marriage, but He did. He shows us a man ready to protect the dignity of a woman. He shows us a woman ready to submit to God’s plans.
God shows us a married couple weathering unexpected news, Jesus’ birth, meeting shepherds and magi, an abrupt move, danger, and more. This caused me to think of so many beautiful and hard examples of the blue and brown in marriage…
Sea and sand
Have you ever been to a beach where the beach is so sloped that the ocean creates waves so rough, they are simply crashing hard against the shore because the slope of the sand does not allow the wave to roll in gently.
This makes me think about miscommunication in marriage, when two people are not hearing each other and one is simply crashing into the other. The other is simply receiving the “crashing” as if there is no other option. That spouse is not necessarily welcoming the information. Whether stubbornness or pride, the spouse’s posture in the conversation is impacting how the communication is received.
However, if a beach is level, waves roll in nicely from large to small. They are received gently onto the beach, rolling up to tickle toes. If spouses are meeting in a place where they are trying to understand one another instead of simply getting their point across or getting a conversation over with, there is a much more healthy entry and exit to the communication. The words are received with ease, a more gentle give and take.
Where the sea rolls onto the sand, you have this mix of water and sand that cannot be separated. It becomes wet sand. Wet sand is the most ideal for building sand castles. It helps create structure and details that you couldn’t do with just water or just sand.
So, a marriage brings out new lessons in life. Marriage causes people to see the world differently because it’s no longer a singular first person story: I becomes we. Married couples learn compromise; they blend their lives together.
The sea also impacts the movement of sand. A rough, stormy sea abruptly moves significant amounts of sand, sometimes to the detriment of beaches and towns. So in marriage a spouse struggling with anger, addiction, or something else can greatly impact their husband or wife.
So also, the sand and its height, drifts, or configurations influence and are influenced by the currents of the sea. The give and take of the sea and the sand is much of what is required of a marriage. Sometimes one has to make moves and shifts in their lives to support the other’s state in life.
Earth and water
Without the many depths and heights of the earth, water would not be contained to the oceans, seas, rivers, creeks and springs of the world, it might simply cover the earth, so that none of it is visible. Instead, God designed the world, so that the two work in tandem to form the beauty of the world, providing water to people to drink, providing beautiful places for leisure.
Both the bodies of water and the structures of the earth contain so many complex and intricate features too many to name, some still undiscovered. Marriage is like this beautiful world we live in. As two lives comes together, there are so many intricacies. These two lives begin to weave together to form a beautiful creation complementing one another and accompanying one another into the depths and to the heights.
In some places the earth cradles the water; in other places the water smooths the earth. In marriage, there are times of nurturing, of creating a space for the other to simply be, and at other times one spouse helps the other smooth the rough edges of life for a more steady path forward for both.
Earth and sky
Any picture a child draws has a sky beginning exactly where the ground ends. This is true when we look onto the horizon. We see the sky meeting the earth, but right in front of us, we see the earth beneath our feet and the sky above our head, where we are is where those two things meet some invisible way to create the layered atmosphere.
Marriage is two distinct people, man and woman, meant to be joined to ultimately create life, and not just human life, but a life that together reflects something unique about the love of God. You see the two distinct humans, but their life together is only made visible through their commitment to each other.
Tears and Dirt
Marriage can be full of tears and dirt. Sometimes tears of joy, sometimes tears of pain or sorrow, but they come. Whether a couple faces infertility or an abundance of children, illness or optimum health, there is no escaping that we are not yet in heaven, and every person inside and outside of marriage will experience great joy and great sorrow, both of which can be accompanied by a great amount of tears.
Likewise, marriage is hard work, and married couples are bound to find themselves up to their knees in dirt, digging themselves out of bad habits they formed in their youth, holes they created by mistakes they’ve made or filling in empty places of their life with fresh soil, clearing out rocks and hard places that don’t allow things to grow. Tears might be shed during the digging, but they bring the rain to help things grow.
The Colors Themselves
Let’s remember that colors are impacted by light. I knew from my years of school science that the reason I see blue is because blue light is reflected back while all other colors are absorbed by the object. Black objects absorb all light; whereas white objects reflect all light. Who is our light? God is our light. We are all a reflection of him. The devil is the darkness. He wants to have none of our light visible.
So what about brown….I had to look it up. Get this…brown exists only in presence of a brighter color contrast. St. Joseph, next to Mary and Jesus…can’t get much brighter than that…Mary’s blue is only blue by the way she is reflecting blue light back from the light she receives from God and St. Joseph’s brown is perceived in the light of Mary’s blue and the white light of Jesus.
Am I crazy or does this seem too coincidental? God-designed, of course. Why would I expect anything less?
“Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.” Romans 1:20 NAB
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