------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your most recent letter to me...said, "Oh Mama, it gets better and better!" You spoke of the utter peace and contentment you know when you are with him. We can believe that God has answered our prayers - mind of years' standing, "Keep her from and for the man she is to marry," ("from" meaning until His chosen time, that you would not hurry ahead of His will)-and yours to be guided to the man of His choice.
And so you wear his ring. Tertullian alludes to the ancient custom of wearing a gold ring on the fourth finger because it was believed that a vein ran from that finger directly to the heart. A woman was allowed to wear gold only there, in promise of marriage. In the medieval service the wedding ring was placed first on the thumb, "in the name of the father," then on the index finger, "in the name of Son," on the third finger, "in the name of the Holy Ghost," and on the fourth finger with the Amen.
When the wedding ring is put on your finger you will have finally sealed your choice. It is this man, and this one along, whom you have chosen for "as long as ye both shall live." There have been many revisions and improvisations in modern weddings, some of them made in the belief that words written by the bride and groom themselves are by that very fact to be preferred above old words written by somebody who knew how to write, because they are more "sincere" or "meaningful" or "honest," as though the repetition of others' words, probably clearer and more beautiful words than most of us could ever have written, cannot possibly be truthful. In one of these improvisations the phrase has been changed from "as long as we both shall live" to "as long as we both shall love." This cuts the heart out of the deepest meaning of the wedding. It is a vow you are making before God and before witnesses, a vow you will by God's grace keep, which does not depend on your moods or feelings or "how things turn out." As others have said, love does not preserve the marriage, the marriage preserves the love.
When you make a choice, you accept the limitations of that choice. To accept limitation requires maturity. The child has not yet learned that it can't have everything. What it sees it wants. What it does not get it screams for. It has to grow up to realize that saying Yes to happiness often means saying No to yourself.
Remember Dinesen's proud man: "He does not strive toward a happiness or comfort which may be irrelevant to God's idea of him." To choose to do this is to choose not to do a thousand other things. Those who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God, of whom Jesus speaks in Matthew 19:12, had to accept the radical limitations which being a eunuch imposed. Those who marry, Paul said, will have troubles in the flesh. Perhaps he felt that that statement was beyond dispute, that such troubles were obvious to anyone, but he did not mention the troubles in the flesh which one who does not marry may encounter. Perhaps that was too close to the bone for Paul to wish to speak of.
Last year there was a symposium of seminary women at which one women complained that everything in the seminary program was based on the assumption that the students were men. The statement was not accurate, but even if it had been, it would seem that a woman who chooses to go to seminary would know ahead of time that the majority of the students would be men and the program would naturally emphasize this. She would be prepared to be in the minority and accept the limitations imposed by this. Common sense would tell her this. I thought of John Sanders, a blind graduate of the seminary. I have never heard John complain that the whole world operates as though everybody can see. Of course the world operates that way. Most people can see. John accepts this as a matter of course, never whines or even refers to his blindness, and makes a way for himself in spite of the (to us) impossible limitations of his life.
You will remember Betty Greene, one of the founders of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, who has flown every kind of plane except a jet. She even ferried bombers during World War II, and you were surprised that she didn't "look like a pilot." Nobody else thought she did either, and often when she would land in some foreign airfields the authorities were nonplussed to see a woman step out of the plane. "Do you fly these planes alone?" she was often asked. But long ago Betty had made up her mind that if she was going to make her way in a man's world she had to be a lady. She would have to compete with men in being a pilot, but she would not compete with men in being a man. She refused to try in any way to act like a man.
It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we've been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single...To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.
