K ingdom Ethics
Letter from a Grateful Son Dear Mom and Dad, I have become convinced that the milestone you are marking today stands as perhaps the greatest personal accomplishment that anyone could achieve in their lifetime. It matters more than any professional achievement, any financial success, any honor or award. I have also come to believe that this achievement— to be happily and successfully married for 50 years—is perhaps the greatest contribution to society that anyone could make in our era. And so I say: Congratulations! Happy 50th anniversary! As you well know, during the course of your lifetime marriage has weakened dramatically as a social institution in America. It was during the early days of your marriage that the divorce rate doubled in the United States (between 1964 and 1975). I know that you both witnessed the collapse of many marriages among your friends and colleagues. But it is now 2011, and you are still going strong. You made it through all the stresses and strains of raising four challenging kids, coping with very limited resources, dealing with frustrations at work, facing illnesses and family crises, and handling all the other things that I will never know about. And you ended up welded together as the most inseparable of lifetime partners.
46 PRISM Magazine
By just being who you are, you have taught us character qualities such as steadfastness, covenant fidelity, forgiveness, compassion, and resilience. You have also modeled the power of Christian faith to anchor human beings through the storms of life and to empower us to be and do far more than we can on our own. As for the contribution that your rock-solid permanence and love have made to my own life, here I can only say that this has been an unspeakable gift to me. I once read that parents are like the scaffolding that children climb to build their own lives. That image continues to make a lot of sense to me, and even though I am now a child of 48 years, I still feel the benefit of the scaffolding that you represent in my life. When I was a little boy, I could know (not think, not hope, but know) that at the end of each day Dad would always come home from work and have me fire fastballs into his catcher’s glove, no matter how sore his hand got. I could know (not think, not hope) that when voices were raised between the two of you it would not be long before you reconciled and all was well again. I could know that, amidst the brutalities of the outside world that I was experiencing personally and learning about in school, there was a place called home that was a safe haven for a sensitive kid like me. I could know that, in spite of the broken relationships I was witnessing among my friends’ parents, yours was just made of firmer sounder stuff. And when I was a mere lad of 22, and I had found my own true love, I could know (not think, not hope) that it is possible to love someone and stay married to her for a lifetime. So, unlike many of my generation and even more in this one, I could marry Jeanie with confidence and
David P. Gushee without undue fear of the fragility and transitory nature of human love. I knew that we would have to work at it, as you did—but I also knew that such work could be successful. In fact, I fully expected that it would be successful, because I had seen that in you, and she had seen that in her own parents. On our wedding day, we had an intact married couple on one side of the aisle, and another intact married couple on the other side of the aisle, and the symbolism of this loving “intactness” must not be underestimated. It is certainly not the experience of many of the couples whose weddings I have performed. I have a current student whose parents divorced when she was a baby. She told me the other day, “I have never personally known two adults who love each other and are married to each other.” What a staggering statement. This makes the very concept of a permanent, lifetime marriage covenant almost inconceivable for her, though she does appear to hope for it one day, with that dreamy, faraway hope with which a girl might dream of Cinderella’s castle. I pity a generation whose experience of family is marked by such profound absence at its very center. I fear for a society in which this is everyday reality. I tremble in gratitude that my own experience has your love at the center of it. On this, your golden wedding anniversary, take a few moments to know what a blessing your love has been in the lives of each of your children, including this very grateful little grown-up boy. Your loving son, David
David P. Gushee is director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, Atlanta, Ga., where he is also a professor of Christian ethics. His latest book is Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul (Mercer University Press, 2010).