When two people fall in love, their personal truth galaxies collide. The consequences are the stuff of novels. They may or may not marry. If they do, their joy in the marital truth galaxy they will birth often reflects what their view of the relationship of those who birthed and raised them.
I appreciated the love and joy my parents found in each other while struggling with so many issues of their life and time. I and my seven siblings often quarreled, suffered broken bones, got sick. They knew we were encountering the moral issues associated with smoking, drinking, drugs, and premarital sex. Mildew, rust, grasshoppers and hailstorms set them back financially seemingly every year. They somehow took the Korean War, the spread of communism, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the possibility of a nuclear war, and the building of bomb shelters all in stride. After their rental lease was terminated in their early fifties, they lived on Mom’s teaching salary while Dad learned to sell farm real estate. Through their sixty years together, they never lost their love of God, joy in life, and trust in each other.
As their son, I grew up knowing that their faith in God and their love for each other was tied into their understandings of the Bible and their joy in church. I was well aware of our financial difficulties and didn’t enjoy the half-hour drive to church every Sunday morning and at least an additional night or two each week. So one day I asked Dad, “Why are you a Christian?
He said, “When you can show me a better way to live, I’ll consider that.”
I liked his answer but went my way without bothering to ask what made his way better. I was struggling for acceptance among friends with little interest in religion and being a Christian wasn’t helping.
I would later find the better way I was seeking. It came during the Night of the Little Self, a few years after meeting Martha, the joy of my life for almost sixty years. While experimenting with ways of sharing “my better way,” the courtship letters of my parents surfaced in their effects. They were youth leaders. They saw in each other a soulmate who had already found that better way.
They were teenagers during the Roaring Twenties and would have heard of the horrors of the Great War with its gas and trench warfare. They had lived through the struggles of Prohibition, the Scopes Trial, and the Great Depression. As they wrote, an even greater world war loomed on the horizon that would incorporate all the technological advances for war on the ground, sea, and air. When the economy again floundered, they anticipated the possibility of another great depression. All the while they struggled with the social issues of playing cards, dancing, drinking, and marital impropriety being vividly displayed in the theaters by a rapidly growing movie industry. In these excerpts from their letters you are privy to their thoughts and reasonings on how their better way and their being soulmates helped them face the concerning issues of their time.
Of course, we’ve other issues: the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran; the political divisions and self-serving leaders; economic insecurity and AI uncertainty; global warming and environmental catastrophes; mental health and PTSD to name a few. Yet, somehow tied into our personal concerns are the cross-cultural concerns for life, worthiness, disclosure, relationships, brokenness, and death and our desires for personal superiority, social influence, and oneness with life when addressing them.
We’ve each a life of experiences and understandings. Reading these excerpts on how my parents addressed their personal concerns won’t change that but it may awaken in you something missing when addressing yours.
Recognizing A Soulmate
Some possible things to seek in a lasting and joy-filled marital relationship
Resolving Difficulties
Some illustrations of finding ones self-responsibility when difficulties arise
Planning the Life Ahead
Some ways in which freedom, respect, and a new sense of home can be assured in a marriage
This Preface to the Third Volume Describes My Role as Curator of
The Letters of Walter and Margaret
In his prelude to Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, Larry L. Rasmussen suggests that human beings must start singing a new song if humanity is to survive on Earth. I’ve yet to read the book, but seeing the ancient in the new is central to understanding the different voices in this final volume of a trilogy on the courtship letters of my parents, Walter and Margaret.
We cannot help but sing the songs of our lives. They become duets when we fall in love. Only close friends and relatives are privy to these duets and then, only occasionally. That was the case for my parents until their courtship letters surfaced after they had passed away.
The courtship of which my parents sang came with three rich and ancient verses: getting to know each other, weighing the pros and cons of a permanent relationship, and preparing to publicly commit at the altar. It’s a song that has been sung many ways. Their harmony is a symphony of love colored by their religious heritage, a heritage I share.
As the curator of these letters, I am joining in their song by coloring bits of what they sing with complementary reflections. This was all I did in the first volume, Encountering God: Reflections on the Courtship Letters of My Parents.
Inspired by things of which they sang in the second volume, Questioning God: Philosophical Reflections on Pivotal Concerns in My Parents’ Letters, I broke out into three solos. I titled my songs “Freeing Unifying Religious Truths from Their Partisan Entanglements,” “Visions of the Oncoming World Order,” and “Seeing Jesus: Same World, New Eyes.” What I sang had already been sung by others, as noted in the extensive references.
The songs I’ve been inspired to sing in this volume are largely my own compositions, evoked by what my parents are singing in their letters. Walter’s questioning a friend’s revelation leads into the first, “The Night of the Little Self.” It is an attempt to describe a startling inversion of my sense of self that opened my eyes to the spirits at play in the world and in these letters. This is followed by “A Helper Fit for Me” when they describe what they truly enjoy in each other. “A Trip with Walter and Margaret” describes a trip my parents took with me to the places and families mentioned in these letters. “Watching the Embodied and Expressed Spirits at Play in These Letters” briefly zooms in on what transpired spiritually in a particularly interesting exchange of letters. How our guiding spirits must be prioritized if we are to do more than just survive on the blue marble we call Earth is proffered in the grand finale, “Joy in This Life and the Life Hereafter.”
To better understand how these guiding spirits infuse our lives and to more fully appreciate that of which I sing, it helps to have a documented case of these spirits at play in our daily lives and in the typifying time frames of those guiding spirits. The courtship letters of Walter and Margaret are notable in that regard. They are well written and cover a critical and familiar time in the lives of so many: the encountering, questioning, and committing phases leading up to a meaningful marriage. In this last third of their letters, we will be looking for what caused Margaret and Walter to sing during the last four months before they publicly declared their commitment at the altar.
