The Last Sunny Day

continued

It was on one of our outings toward the end of September, as we gathered up the leftovers of our picnic, that John, looking thoughtful, said, "We really should get married before Christmas."

I stopped packing my bike basket and stared at him. Marriage had never even been mentioned. Certainly I'd never told him about that strange "knowing" on the Queen Elizabeth.

"There's a three-week break then," John went on, as though the matter was long decided. "We could go down to Italy, write about how things have changed since the war. But we'd need to be married."

It was true; in the Europe of 1947, "decent" single women did not travel with male companions. The story idea -- a soldier revisiting battle scenes -- was a good one too. Ideas bubbled up from both of us. The fact that we would marry was as obvious, now that it had been said, as useless to debate, as the snowcapped Alps soaring above us. And as hard to accomplish, we were to learn, as to climb those distant peaks.

I learned something that day about the ideas we reject offhand. The prospect that had seemed so forbidding in theory, marriage-in-the-abstract, vanished like the phantom it was in the face of a specific relationship. There is no marriage-in-general, only marriages, each different. Conflicts there would certainly be in ours, as in every close relationship, but not the home versus career tension I'd imagined.

Having learned this about marriage, how was it that I held on so long to another stereotype, Christians-in-general? They, I believed, were all the same. Why was I so slow to grasp that there are no "Christians-in-the-abstract," only the specific relationship of each believer to Jesus.