Commitment

Why get married?

Vows: this was about solemnizing, a strong binding. And that meant, as I commented in my address, stretching the softer aspects of love to include patience, compassion and a resolute act of faith in each other’s capacity to work through the challenges. An enjoyable partnership had just turned into a potentially deepening union.

…in this life the value of a vow can be experienced every time the mind wobbles, and the reminder comes up: ‘But you’ve made a commitment to this.’ Rightly held, commitment refers our actions and attitudes to core values, and steers the mind towards deepening.

Or, in Buddhist terms, wise resolution (adhitthāna) is the foundation for the spiritual perfections (pāramī): generosity, morality, renunciation and the rest.  Perhaps now that marriage is more a conscious extra to a relationship, it can encourage those virtues.

The decision to make any commitment casts a cool light over the drama of the human plane. It’s about maintaining values while the world of surfaces swirls around and sometimes over you.  And what causes us to make a resolve is perhaps a recognition of the swirling and unsteady nature of all surfaces. That recognition, and sometimes even the decision, is more of a felt thing than an idea.

As for marriage and divorce: amongst the people I know, most of the marriages have lasted and strengthened. On the other hand, recent reflections from post-marriage friends also bear witness to what that can take. A woman who had stayed with her husband for fifty years until death commented that although the marriage had been rashly undertaken, and although when the romantic glow faded she didn’t like her mate that much – yet she had loved him.  Others remarked on how freeing the divorces had been for all concerned: like getting out of a cage. 

It wasn’t as if the marriage commitment had been to get beyond desire and realize nibbāna in the first place; but even that commitment had checked a lot of self-centredness and thrown light on emotions and attitudes. Whether it’s to another person, or to a Sangha life, commitment to ‘the other’ always helps us to learn what we can’t see in ourselves.

People might imagine that you get out of all that in Sangha life; that awakening could somehow happen without revealing – revealing a lot about oneself and the human condition. The myth of the tranquil haven where those others are running away from the world still lingers.  (If one could run away from the world, and if that were a good thing, then indeed why not).

But the ‘dark matter’ which apparently makes up most of the Universe, and whose psychological aspect wells up from beneath the waves of personal mood and inclinations, isn’t something that is escaped from. Go to a tropical island, and it sits on the beach beside you; douse it in wine – it blinks once and grips you harder; sit cross-legged and focused on your breathing – it murmurs in your heart.

And when one enters community life, the dark matter whinges, recoils, judges and caricatures one’s fellow aspirants. It seems to be the fault of the others, the tradition or the sense of being a public icon – but when all that changes, the restlessness, the desires and resistances, and the doubts and gloom stay on.  

So one either has to adjust to another way of life, or breathe gently, patiently through it all. Reveal what seems to be your self, meet it in a clear and reflective place, and deal with it.  As in a marriage, the commitment asks us to keep putting more of our attention and consideration into it – or it goes flat and even toxic.

So commitments don’t carry guarantees – but without them, how far, how deep do you go?

A part of us wants to play around on the surface, to splash and skim, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so. But in the heart there’s also the inclination towards deepening: to be taken beyond our personal moods, to be made to work on ourselves. Inspiration and tedium, joy, grief, and all the nothing special in between: to meet what life brings up and work through holding on to any of it.

Then when death grabs all we’re bound up with, spirit has a way to get through. Because if you can’t handle getting taken to uncomfortable depths – why get married, why become a monk?  In fact where’s the growth, and what’s the point of being alive?  After all, you have to take your life like a hoop and throw it towards the peg that feels right. Who knows how good a throw is until you’ve made it?

Life is made sublime through sacrifice, and something in us knows that.

So here’s the challenge for commitment: see the anxiety, darkness or pain in yourself or another; take hold of the mundane and by working out your expectations, biases, impatience and all the rest – widen into this strange space called love. Then include it all.

These reflections by Ajahn Sucitto are from the blog post “Love, Marriage, and Self-Surrender,” Sunday, 14 October 2012.