In the fall of 2020, my mother and father spent almost an entire day in the same room. It was the first time that had been true for two decades. As far as I can remember, they did not speak to each other. It was my wedding day. My father came with his party—my stepmother, two half sisters, and my aunt. My mother came alone. She was joined by my brother and his girlfriend. In the aftermath of a difficult divorce, we children were left to ally ourselves with one parent or the other, stretching the bonds of childhood loyalty. That almost thirty years after the fact they remain so affected by a marriage has been a testament to me of its power. 

The night before my wedding, I shared a hotel room with my mother. My own bed was in my future husband’s house already. It was not exactly restful. We played out the inverse of what had been a constant drama in my childhood—relational anxiety brought on by the arrival of a new partner. In her defence, I had been a reckless teenager, and my engagement had been short. I was just starting to understand what I had put her through. 

My mother was married twice. After my dad there was the karate-instructor stepfather, who appeared one day and became the first target of my irrational jealousy toward any man who loved my mother. He was sent packing two years in, and we never had to take another karate lesson again, for which I remain deeply grateful. 

Years later, she met a musician and handyman whom we all loved the most. He lived with us for about six years and loved us and took care of us as though we were his own children. He drove a green station wagon we called the Sweet Pickle. The back row faced the cars behind us, and when his children came to spend weeks with us, we argued over who would get to ride in one of the prized seats. He encouraged me to try to understand my own father. When he and my mother parted, my brother and I were given explicit orders to never speak to him again. Well trained in the virtue of filial piety, we obeyed, and I never have. 

Later, there was the stern boyfriend from my mother’s high school days who swept into our lives with a Facebook message and brought us out of California to the East Coast. He always seemed surprised that his pretty, sweet, high school girlfriend was now a woman, with two teenage children in tow. I’m sorry to say that we were not inclined to make ourselves well liked. My brother and I had not understood the stakes. 

Through it all, my mother was beautiful, steadfast, and devoted to us above anything else. She was our loudest advocate, our comforter, and the one we knew would be there regardless of the personal cost to herself. She set a high standard. 

When I told my mother that I had met the man who would be my husband at church, she was wary. 

Her premarital advice was brief. “Don’t let them change you.” I was not raised with the notion of marriage as a sanctifying relationship. Sanctification itself was never made much of in my household. My mom has always believed in my basic goodness, despite all contrary evidence. The fact is that I have been changed through marriage. I don’t know how it could have been avoided. What’s troubling is that I still have not been changed enough. 

This summer I came across Robert Farrar Capon’s book on marriage, Bed and Board, fifty years after its original publication. My edition includes a note from his second wife, Valerie, added in 2017. She introduces the work as “a nostalgic look at the way we were,” referring to “our marriages and child-rearing styles in the 1950s and 60s.” In the first chapter Capon gives as his first credential that he is an Episcopal priest, the son of a complicated mother. He cites as his second credential his own married estate. He says in that paragraph, “Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself.” And “divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility.” Valerie, who was by all accounts an excellent wife, was not the wife he knew at the time of writing this book. In 1977 he was removed from his position as a parish priest at Christ Episcopal Church in Long Island after he announced that he planned to divorce his wife and marry again. This second marriage, which lasted until his death in 2013, was by all accounts very good. In her introductory note, Valerie states, “We may even find a few gems worth polishing that could light our way back to the dinner table and one another. . . . Robert lived this as he wrote about it.” 

About the wife of his youth, the mother of his six children, we learn very little. She is made much of in the book, yet it is hard to definitively say that she is more than a good cook who, as a child, “cared mightily for condensed milk.” The biography in the back of the book does not even mention her. In light of how things ended, it seems a significant oversight. “A man can give his wife so little besides trouble,” Capon writes. 

The book, nevertheless, is beautiful and aspirational. Capon urges men to “treat them [their wives] as wives—to be indeed their heads, their lovers and their first movers. An appalling number of men are relational blanks in their marriages.” To believe the many women who turn to the internet for help and advice, this is still true today. Too many husbands and fathers must be bullied and browbeaten into taking an active interest in their home life, or have it gamified, as the creator of Fair Play promotes. 

In a chapter titled “Board,” Capon decries the world’s continual assault on family life and family culture. He calls out familiar enemies like the television, children’s extracurricular programming, and suburban lifestyles, all of which remain at large. In spite of this narrative of decline, he suggests not that we “return” but rather that we learn to use wisdom in creating the peculiar “provinciality” of our own tables. 

On the virtue needed for two sinners to remain together, he states, “A husband and a wife cannot long exist as one flesh, if they are habitually unkind, rude or untruthful. . . . The ground line of the walls of the New Jerusalem is made of stuff like truthfulness, patience, love and liberality; of prudence, justice, temperance and courage; and of all their adjuncts and circumstances: manners, consideration, fair speech and the ability to keep one’s mouth shut and one’s heart open, as needed.” 

He stands up in support of the procreative nature of the marriage bed, even if he will not quite “rail” in favour of it. 

He vindicates materialism in a chapter titled “Things.” Rejecting asceticism, he argues instead that the world is filled with “things” because God likes it that way. It follows that “if God made things because he liked them, God’s image should not be surprised to find that, in his own proportion, he likes them too.” He proclaims the dire urgency of teaching your children to care. Warning against shallow care, he writes, “The discarded home-movie outfit is one thing, the discarded wife or child quite another. In either case, however, possession proves or disproves care.” It is painful to know that, in the end, he could not pull it off. 

My father, who was a pastor, moved across the country, married the woman who would become my stepmother, and had my two sisters. They have had a good marriage, although I have seen it mostly from a distance. He is slow to advise. He has never, as Capon suggests, presided over his table with wine and liturgy. He does not take himself so seriously. On the contrary, he provided almost no religious education. I have come to know him slowly, hindered by the separation of divorce and distance. He is convivial, popular, and funny. He is abounding in charm, and a little bit frightening. He is very busy. In one sense, his faith is the source of every public activity of his life. In another sense, it rests easily on him. After years of listening to his preaching, I had to learn as an adult that Jesus died to ransom me, and to conquer death, and to pay the price for my sin. I’m sure he must have mentioned it sometime. I must not have had the ears to hear. 

It always rankles when the pastor’s orthopraxy cannot live up to his orthodoxy. I know there are many cases of pastoral fathers who can tithe all manner of spices but neglect the weightier measures of the law. As a mother myself now, I often find myself moved to compassion for them and for their children. I look at my own little boys, whom I love like nothing else. I look up to my parents. I have not fallen far from their tree. It makes me love them more. I am demanding, indulgent, testy, and unsympathetic. And that’s only what I know so far. If not for the grace of God, I could not bear it.

“The great truth is that we exist for our functions, not our functions for us,” Capon says. “I’m not here to get myself happy, but to put myself into my role. . . . We don’t often do it that way, but that is how we are put together.” The discussion on roles runs so counter to contemporary ways of thinking that it almost feels offensive. 

I am myself and I am a woman. I am myself and I am a wife. I am myself and I am a mother. No matter how much my husband loves me and knows me as an individual, it is actually what I am to him that matters most. I have met many men in my life, and if it were not for the fact that we were married in front of God and witnesses, my husband could be only a man to me. Maybe a friend, maybe even a good friend, but he would never be able to be what he can be now. He has been conformed to the image of a husband, more specifically my husband, elevating him above all other men, a profound mystery. This and much more is true for my children. I am, because of the supernatural laws of the universe, the mother they have. Because our family is the way it is, even if I died, even if I lost all my senses and ran away, I would be their mother. Whether for good or for evil, I am their mother. 

This of course implicates, but should in no way diminish, all parents, including my own. I would argue that this bestows on them all the honour they are due. It also means that I can never know them on their own terms. All their lives they have moved and lived and had their being under the eyes of God. For the last few decades, they have been subject to judgment by their own creation. To honour “Tina” and “Marcus” might be good. To honour my mother and my father is a command from the Lord. They are Mother and Father, no matter how I might have done things differently. 

My mother hoped I would not be changed. She spoke, I know, out of fear and love. I’ll have to do it anyway. I simply can’t afford to cling to cynicism, selfishness, or fear. There is too much to do, and those vices won’t help me where I’m going. Capon urges, “Be a gracious, bending woman.” I have to bend down to meet my children where they are. When I reach down to comfort them, I am reminded of my Father in heaven, who condescended to us in the incarnation. 

The whole business of pregnancy and childbirth happens through a woman, but by no means through her own effort. I could not tell you how to make a human heart, yet on this earth there are two little boys with hearts that grew inside me. What does this say about the God who made us all? Is anything too hard for the Lord? To be unchanged would be to be as deaf and dumb as the bones in Ezekiel’s vision. Let me be like Sarah, who learned in the end to put her hope in God alone. 

In the fourth chapter of Genesis, after they hear the proto-evangelion (the first declaration of the gospel) and are sent out of Eden, Eve bears a son and says, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” She does not know Cain is not the Man, the Son of Man who will save the world, but she believes the promises of God. Until we have faith like our first parents, we cannot be changed enough. 

Capon ends his book with a discourse on the Trinity and what this means for us mortal men and women. It is especially the mutuality of things that seems to amaze him, and amazes me. “Mankind is engaged in an essay in membership.” It is all an effort, whether we believe it or not, to build the heavenly Jerusalem on earth. We cannot avoid it. “The world,” he says, “is the way it is, because God is the way he is. . . . It is the mutuality of the world that is its greatest wonder.” 

He denounces the “intelligibility” of the builders of Babel, calling it “logical as the serpent was logical; it is man trying to do something intelligible to the world” by building a tower to ascend to heaven. I can imagine the technocrats of Silicon Valley reading the story of Babel with approval. When, in the next chapter of Genesis, God himself condescends to Abram, it is what Capon calls “the triumph of the odd.” 

“The eleventh chapter of Genesis declares the bankruptcy of fallen reasonableness; in the twelfth, the city goes into an absurd receivership, to be built . . . not with bricks but by obedience, not with knowledge but by faith.” Again and again, as Capon’s own life teaches, it is not enough to have the “right tools,” or to know the “right stuff.” 

He concludes with a rousing postscript, a depiction of family dinner, with all his ambition submitted to the realities of his children. Like errant children of our heavenly Father, his creations buffet him with complaints and requests. Unlike our Father in heaven, he has no patience for it: “‘Quiet! You are all on silence!’ It is a pretty negative fiat, but it works.” They work, fight, sing, and pray together, and Capon thanks them for their company in the “long short years.” 

The book on the whole rings true. Sometimes the negative example is the proof needed. It is a miracle indeed that two people ever marry and live together. It is a greater miracle if they manage it as long as they both shall live. It clearly requires the intervention of the Holy Spirit. As the psalmist (who ought to know) said himself, unless the Lord builds the house, the labourers—like the men of Babel—will find that they have laboured in vain.