As a campus minister, it seems I’m witnessing an increase in the myriad of problems that arise out of a desperate need students have to control their lives.  I realize that to say this need for control is the necessary outcome of a more subjective and individualized culture might be redundant, but maybe it’s worth saying again.  The 18 to 22 year olds who will soon be unleashed into this world long for a unique life that asserts their individuality.  So, the need to meticulously control the details of ones life in order to arrive at that goal of uniqueness often leave me working with lonely and relationally dysfunctional people.  I guess I could boil it down to this: relationships are the bane of selfishness’ existence. 

Where I see this play itself out most visibly is with couples contemplating marriage.  For most, once the gooey, sappy initial stages are over, and the idea of marriage enters the picture, it’s as if both parties pull out their “life game-plan” and see if they could actually get the benefits of companionship without having to sacrifice their dreams or individuality.  To voluntarily force one's life into a constraint that might mean giving up something seems out of the question.

In Wendell Berry’s essay, Poetry and Marriage, he writes, “It may be...that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course.  It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings.”  It is exactly the strictures of a sonnet, fourteen lines ending in a couplet, which force the poet toward beauty.  John Donne could have written a wonderful treatise instead of “Batter My Heart Three Personed God,” but I doubt we would call it beautiful. 

In the same way, the covenant of marriage baffles and constrains.  It limits us to one person and doesn’t give us many options for leaving.  It calls us to die to one another.  All of these things sound perfectly awful to modern ears because they have forgotten that all beauty arises out of constraint.  As Berry so beautifully says, “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”  Everyone wants to sing; we just doubt that it will happen through being impeded, so we remove all possibilities.  We view freedom as being able to carry out our plan for life, whatever that may be, but we don’t stop to consider that at best it will be utterly boring, and at worst it will be tragic.  But we have to remember that the ultimate beauty and wonder arose when Jesus said to the Father, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”  And the world has never been the same.