Marriage and Spiritual Identity

I'm reading a book called, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. This book is actually a transcript of conversations Bill Moyers had with Cambell in the late 80's for a PBS series that was produced. In one part, Campbell uses marriage as an example of how myth puts your mind in touch with the experience of being alive. While reading his description of marriage, I realized this is exactly how Jack and I thought of marriage. This is how we were in our marriage. This is how we behaved in our marriage. This is why it is so difficult for me to seperate from him even though he is no longer here on a day to day basis. We were committed to not just being together, but being one. I'm figuring out how to do the day to day without him. I have yet to figure out how to make ME whole and don't know if it is even possible.

Here's the excerpt:

Marriage. The myth tells you what it is. It's the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It's different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It's another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we'll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that's what marriage is.

I would say that if the marriage isn't the first priority in your life, you're not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true- the two really are one. One not only biologically but spiritually. Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction which may lead you to the wrong identification.

There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I've been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the chld, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other.

Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting - that's the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that's what you have become when you have married. You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

Marriage is not incompatible with the idea of doing one's own thing since it's not simply one's own thing. It is, the two together as one. And that's a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for the transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave.

Marriage is primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man.