Essence Of Marriage Quotes

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must BE tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.

Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is not found only at the end of the rainbow. Love is at the beginning also, and from it springs the beauty that arched across the sky on a stormy day. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, and the lubricant that prevents devastating friction in the home; it is the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope shining through death. How rich are those who enjoy it in their associations with family, friends, and neighbors! Love, like faith, is a gift of God. It is also the most enduring and most powerful virtue.

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage.

In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family's interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual's happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good - not the individual or the family - and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.

A man approaching retirement called the retirement office to inquire about his pension. Afterward, he was asked if his wife worked. “She’s worked all her life making me happy”, he replied. “Yes sir, but has she earned money to receive her pension?” “When we got married we agreed on an arrangement”, he said. “I would earn the living, and she would make the living worthwhile”. “Make the living worthwhile”…have we forgotten the very essence of that? Have we forgotten to live for someone else, that doing so IS what makes a living worthwhile?

Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is more than the end of the rainbow. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, and the lubricant that prevents devastating friction in the home; it is the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope shinning through death.

Happiness is love’s outcome, never its motive. Where someone is loved he is an end in himself and certainly not a means toward something else. It is therefore of love’s essence, wherever it is found, that the loved one seem precious, beautiful, and worthy of love.

To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

Let Love Move You... If you can’t stop thinking of her, it’s because her essence has left an imprint on your heart… on your soul... Don’t be afraid of this feeling; be nourished by it... Let it stir your entire being… Let it help release your greatest self... Let it inspire you to be loving… to be respectful… to be romantic… to be intelligent… to be passionate… to be a good listener… to be appreciative… Let this wonderful feeling move you to become a passionate love maker… a ravenous seducer... Do not be afraid of this deep love! Let it reveal the best of you… Let this feeling encourage you to behave in an honest and sincere manner… So that you may be more than a person she would settle for… so that you may be a person she would yearn for.

I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

Are you really saying there's only one way to God?' people immediately ask. Yet even as we ask the question, we reveal the problem. If there were 1,000 ways to God, we would want 1,001. The issue is not how many ways lead to God; the issue is our autonomy before God. We want to make our own way. This is the essence of sin in the first place — trusting our way more than God's way.

The tigress didn’t so much pace as pour herself, as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano.

When the woman said, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you,” she was using a very specific definition of “love.” She was assuming that love is, in its essence, a particular kind of feeling. She was saying, “I feel romantic passion for you, and the piece of paper doesn’t enhance that at all, and it may hurt it.” She was measuring love mainly by how emotionally desirous she was for his affection. And she was right that the marital legal “piece of paper” would do little or nothing directly to add to the feeling.

The key to understnading masculinity is Jesus Christ. Jesus was tough with religious blockheads, false teachers, the proud, and bullies. Jesus was tender with women, children, and those who were suffering or humble. Additionally, Jesus took responsability for Himself. He worked a jon for the first thirty years of His life, swinging a hammer as a carpenter. He also took responsability for us on the cross, where He substituted Himself and died in our place for our sins. My sins are my fault, not Jesus'fault, but Jesus has made them His responsability. This is the essence of the gospel, the "good news". If you understand this, it will change how you view masculinity.

Children raised in a couple-centered home more fully understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s love manifested in marriage speaks more to kids than any Sunday school lesson or sermon. This truth is the essence of Ephesians 5:25. Marriage is used as a word picture for God’s love for the church. What is your marriage teaching your kids about Jesus?

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact. JACK. I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted. ALGERNON. Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in Heaven-...

Spiritual assistance isn't there to make things easy and have everything go your way, but to help you grow into the fuller version of who you are. Rather than revealing that you're on the wrong track, shake-up and breakup often indicate that you're really starting to get somewhere. Of course, it's hard to feel this way while getting battered around by the severe crosswinds of our time, but that's when you most need to know it. In the Western world we lack a clear set of guidelines for times like these. We lack meaningful rites of passage. We fail to equip people for knowing what to expect at key crossroads of the soul. We lack substantial guides for teaching individuals how to stay with their deep inner truth when all hell breaks loose. We get thrown into extreme life-changing passages like birth, first blood, first sex, marriage, pregnancy, child-bearing, divorce and death with only superficial guidance, and no deep cultural support for grasping the full significance of what we're coming out of and going into. So disruptions along the way don't usually appear as well-designed hurdles of initiation in a spiritual journey. Usually they appear as impossible dilemmas that bust your ass and belie evidence of any greater design. Major rites of passage in the Western world rarely come in the form of sacred rituals but are embedded within mundane circumstance. It takes special perception to recognize the initiatory path through the chaos. It takes a shamanic perspective to realize that, like a winepress of the gods, rigorous challenges are there to squeeze out your impurities and release your essence. ...

Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be criticism.

The essence of what the Bible calls sin is the exaltation of self. God has designed us to put him first in our lives, others next, and ourselves last. Yet sin reverses that order: we put ourselves first, others next (many times in an attempt to use them for ourselves), and God somewhere (if anywhere) in the distant background. We turn from worshiping God to worshiping self.

Maybe that’s what marriage was, in essence — an unspoken agreement regarding division of neuroses and quirks so that the bases were covered and neither partner stepped on the other’s toes.

One of the most widely held beliefs in our culture today is that romantic love is all important in order to have a full life but that it almost never lasts. A second, related belief is that marriage should be based on romantic love. Taken together, these convictions lead to the conclusion that marriage and romance are essentially incompatible, that it is cruel to commit people to lifelong connection after the inevitable fading of romantic joy. The Biblical understanding of love does not preclude deep emotion. As we will see, a marriage devoid of passion and emotional desire for one another doesn’t fulfill the Biblical vision. But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.

If you’re not in touch with your sensuality, in essence, what you’re saying I will not let any man express his true potential and therefore win in life. This also means, you don’t want to be served and adored.

Often, our relationships become an unrealized quest for what is perfect, unfettered, and free of flaws. We expect our partners, spouses, and our friends to avoid missteps and to be magical mind readers. These secret expectations play a sinister part in many of the great tragedies of our lives: failed marriages, dissipated dreams, abandoned careers, outcast family, deserted children, and discarded friendships. We readily forget what we once knew as children: our flaws are not only natural but integral to our beings. They are interwoven into our soul’s DNA and yet we continually reject the crooked, wrinkled, mushy parts of our life rather than embrace them as the very essence of our beings. I once believed that aiming for perfection would land me in the realm of excellence. This, however, may not be the trajectory of how things happen. In fact, the pursuit of perfection may be the biggest obstacle to becoming whole. It seems essential to value hard work and determination and yet recognize that the road to excellence is littered with mistakes and subsequent lessons. Imperfection and excellence are intertwined. There is joy in our pain, strength in weakness, courage in compassion, and power in forgiveness.

She slid her free hand over his shoulder, soft breasts crushing against his chest. All his blood rushed down to his groin, taking with it the last vestiges of his rational thought. He locked his arms around her, pulling her so close he could feel each gentle breath as an exquisite stroke on his cock. Raw desire coursed through his veins as his hands skimmed over the sweet softness of her curves. "Someone is watching us through the window," she murmured, her breath warm on his cheek. "All the more reason to put on a good show." With one hand on her nape, he tipped back her head and covered her mouth with his own. A moan escaped her lips, filling his head with thoughts of tangled sheets, banging headboards, sweat-slicked skin, and the realization of a fantasy that had consumed him night after sleepless night since she'd turned sixteen and he'd realized she wasn't a little girl anymore. He parted her lips with the gentle slide of his tongue, touching, tasting, savoring, pausing between heady sips to let her essence dance over his taste buds. With every breath he inhaled the fresh scent of wildflowers in a rain-soaked meadow, the grassy lawn where they'd played catch in the summer sun. He'd known she was smart and fun and beautiful. But this kiss. These feelings. The throbbing heat of desire. It was all completely new.

If it were true that men and women are, at their essence, so profoundly different—from Mars and Venus, perhaps—then there’s no reason why strict adherence to the doctrine of separate spheres would inflict psychological damage. As it turns out, though, both men and women are, psychologically speaking, from Earth.

Epithalamium Without silence there would be no music. Life paired is doubtless more difficult than solitary existence - just as a boat on the open sea with outstretched sails is trickier to steer than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners after all are meant for wind and motion, not idleness and impassive quiet. A conversation continued through the years includes hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred, but also compassion, deep feeling. Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces. Only love and time, when reconciled, permit us to see other beings in their enigmatic, complex essence, unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement in a valley, or among green hills. In begins from one day only, from joy and pledges, from the holy day of meeting, which is like a moist grain; then come the years of trial and labor, sometimes despair, fierce revelation, happiness and finally a great tree with rich greenery grows over us, casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it. In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage. Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment. As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman." Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.

At the beginning of a full five-stage Tragedy, the central figure is always part of a community, a network of relationships, linked to other people by ties of loyalty, friendship, family or marriage. And one of the most important things which happens to such heroes and heroines as they embark on their tragic course is that they begin to break those bonds of loyalty, friendship and love (even if, initially, they may form other alliances). It is the very essence of Tragedy that the hero or heroine should become, step by step, separated from other people. Often they separate themselves in the most obvious, violent and final way possible, by causing other people's deaths.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past - how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or the inferno, no one remembers anything much. Affairs and marriages ended long ago come to resemble postcards from the past. Brief note about the weather, a quick story, funny or sad, a bright picture on the other side. First to go, Roland thought as he walked towards her house, was the elusive self, precisely how you were yourself, how you appeared to others.

The impossible class. — Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

What is of a higher order is always depicted in myths and sagas as a female figure. In Goethe's Faust it is indicated in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: 'The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.' Various peoples have depicted a person's inner striving towards a higher consciousness as a union with a higher aspect of the being that is seen as feminine. What is depicted as a marriage is a person's union with the cosmic laws that permeate and illumine his soul. For example, in ancient Egypt we see Isis, and as always the female figure that is looked up to as the higher consciousness has characteristics that correspond to those of the particular people. What a people feels to be its real essence, its true nature, is depicted as a female figure corresponding to this ideal — a feminine aspect with which the individual human being becomes united after death, or also while still living.

It is difficult to sneak little shreds of life this way but women do it every day. When a woman feels compelled to sneak life, she is in minimal subsistence mode. She sneaks life away from the hearing of “them,” whoever the “them” is in her life. She acts disinterested and calm on the surface, but whenever there is a crack of light, her starved self leaps out, runs for the nearest life form, lights up, kicks back, charges madly, dances herself silly, exhausts herself, then tries to creep back to the black cell before anyone notices she is gone. Women with poor marriages do this. Women made to feel inferior do this. Women filled with shame, women fearing punishment, ridicule, or humiliation do this. Instinct-injured women do this. Sneaking is good for a captured woman only if she sneaks the right thing, only if that thing leads to her liberation. In essence, sneaking good and filling and brave pieces of life causes the soul to be even more determined that the sneaking stop, and that it be free to lead life out in the open as it sees fit. You see, there is something in the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever on piecemeal intake. Because in actuality, it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then be content with no more.

ETERNITY IS NOT ENDLESS TIME or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time. If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colors blend into a single color—white—which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. If you spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined. As human beings we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of which everything passes away—including ourselves. As human beings, we also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a death, a marriage—some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what “it’s all about” involves not just the present, but the past and future too. Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot in eternity. God, as Isaiah says (57:15), “inhabiteth eternity,” but stands with one foot in time. The part of time where he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is all about, and what we ourselves are all about too.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Hitherto all that has given colour to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast, and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of areists, and of mechanics have they already found been found and thought about? There is so much in them to think about! All that up till now has been considered as the "conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion and superstition in this consideration have they been investigated to the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("on what account does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of highest value shine here and that sun there?") And there is again a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons, and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made. Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to provide goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and destroy them and then would be the time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history. Science has not as yet built its Cyclopic buildings; but for that also the time will come.

Myself and my colleague Guy Madison (Dutton & Madison, 2017) inadvertently provided evidence for the Finnish inferiority complex in a study we did of every marriage between a Finn and a foreigner that took place in Finland in the year 2013. On average, males and females operate different sexual selection strategies. Males have nothing to lose from the sexual encounter, so it makes sense for them, if they can get away with it, to have as much sex as possible with as many different women as possible in order to maximise the probability that their genes will be passed on. Accordingly, they select for youth and beauty, as these are markers of fertility and health. The essence of beauty is a symmetrical face and a such face implies a low level of mutant genes and thus sound genetic health. Females operate differently. As we discussed briefly earlier, they have a great deal to lose from the sexual encounter, because they can become pregnant, which carries with it a range of social and physical costs. This makes them more selective. Specifically, they are sexually attracted to high status men as these men will have the resources to provide for them and their child, meaning that both of them are more likely to survive (Buss, 1989). So, socioeconomically, women ‘marry up’ (hypergamously) and men ‘marry down’ (hypogamously). We would expect that nationality would be an aspect of status. We tested this by ranking different nationalities based on various criteria and especially how wealthy a country was. We predicted that, among marriages between a Finn and a foreigner, Finnish women would to a greater extent marry men that were from countries ranked as higher status than Finland while Finnish men would disproportionately marry women from lower status countries. This is, overall, what we found. However, we specifically found that, whatever the objective national status differences, Finnish women married Western European and Anglophone (USA, Canada and so on) men while Finnish men married Eastern European and East Asian (including Japanese) women. This would imply, whatever the economic reality, that Finns regard themselves as inferior to pretty much all Western Europeans. It also indicates that the Japanese – who are far wealthier than the Finns – regard themselves as inferior to the Finns, presumably because there is some idolization of whiteness or, possibly, as has been argued by a Japanese anthropologist, the Japanese specifically adore Finnish culture (Mitsui, 2012).

The impossible class. Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

The essence of the tribal lineage was the descent of property through the male line. But producing a male heir under medieval conditions of short life expectancy and high infant mortality was far from a sure thing. So the tribes had various strategies for keeping wealth within the lineage. These included cousin marriage, divorce if a woman bore no heir, adoption and the levirate (marrying of widows to their husband’s brother). In addition, women were not allowed to own property.

None of us realizes how before marriage we spend our little years, our teen years, and especially our college years dreaming, envisioning, creating ideas of exactly what marriage will be and the multiple ways it will heal our hurts, brokenness, and loneliness. We begin to look closely at marriages and relationships we desire to emulate, and we begin to prescribe for ourselves the perfect marriage. In essence, we create a golden calf idol of the many ways marriage will fix us. But marriage was never designed to fix.

Veronica was drawn to the essence of life. She fed on it, devoured it, leaving behind an empty husk. I don’t mean just our marriage either.

An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbage-field that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.

Such is the essence of vows. Delicately created. Easily torn with strands intended for repair. Beauty revealed in the goodness of light, yet even in darkness, they remain.

...My niece Peggy is at camp in the Adirondacks so I am staying in her room. It's essence of teenage girl: soft lilac walls, colored photographs of rock stars, nosegays of artificial flowers, signs on the door: THIS ROOM IS A DISASTER AREA, and GARBAGEDUMP. 'Some ashcan at the world's end...' But this is not my family's story, nor is it Molly's: the coon hound pleading silently for table scraps. The temperature last night dipped into the forties: a record for August 14th. There is a German down pouff on the bed and I was glad to wriggle under it and sleep the sleep of the just. Today is a perfection of blue: the leaves go lisp in the breeze. I wish I were a better traveler; I love new places, the arrival in station after the ennui of a trip. On the train across the aisle from me there was a young couple. He read while she stroked the flank of his chest in a circular motion, motherly, covetous. They kissed. What is lovelier than young love? Will it only lead to barren years of a sour marriage? They were perfect together. I wish them well. This coffee is cold. The eighteen-cup pot like most inventions doesn't work so well. A few days: how to celebrate them? It's today I want to memorialize but how can I? What is there to it? Cold coffee and a ham-salad sandwich? A skinny peach tree holds no peaches. Molly howls at the children who come to the door. What did they want? It's the wrong time of year for Girl Scout cookies. My mother can't find her hair net. She nurses a cup of coffee substitute, since her religion (Christian Science) forbids the use of stimulants. On this desk, a vase of dried blue flowers, a vase of artificial roses, a bottle with a dog for a stopper, a lamp, two plush lions that hug affectionately, a bright red travel clock, a Remington Rand, my Olivetti, the ashtray and the coffee cup....

As the Italian diplomat Giovanni Battista Primi Visconti concluded after a lengthy sojourn at the court of Versailles: “He [Louis XIV] knew how to play the king perfectly on all occasions.” During the final decades of his reign, he became a sort of one-man stylistic police, obsessively checking to make sure everything around him constantly lived up to his aesthetic standards. When all was just right, he took great pleasure in the conspicuous display of gorgeousness. For example, on December 7, 1697, the King—he was then fifty-nine—hosted some of the grandest festivities of the age to celebrate the marriage of his eldest grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. For one evening reception, Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors was lit with four thousand candles, transforming it into a vast arcade of flickering light.

Following fascism through five stages, in each of which it acts differently, raises an awkward question: Which is the real fascism? For some authors, usually those most concerned with fascism’s intellectual expressions, the early movements are “pure” fascism while the regimes are corruptions, deformed by the compromises necessary for achieving and wielding power. The regimes, however, for all their pragmatic choices and compromising alliances, had more impact than the movements because they possessed the power of war and death. A definition that does full justice to the phenomenon of fascism must apply to the later stages as effectively as it does to the earlier ones. Focusing on those later stages requires us to give as much attention to settings and to allies as to the fascists themselves. A usable definition of fascism must also, therefore, find a way to avoid treating fascism in isolation, cut off from its environment and its accomplices. Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law. The precise proportions of the mixture are the result of processes: choices, alliances, compromises, rivalries. Fascism in action looks much more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.

Summing Up In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, whose official teaching states that procreation defines the essential purpose of marriage, most Protestant churches emphasize instead that the unitive meaning of marriage defines its essence. Therefore, though procreation always assumes and requires the context of marriage in Christian ethics, marriage does not require procreation in order to be valid, and the inability to bear children is never a sufficient reason to dissolve a marriage. Society’s interest in supporting marriage is based in part on its desire to provide for the care of children, but this does not by any means make up the only reason why marriage receives legal benefits in modern societies. Society benefits in a wide variety of ways when people live together in long-term committed unions. If this is true, then the lack of procreative capacity cannot of itself be a sufficient reason to deny the legitimacy of stable gay or lesbian marriages or marriagelike relationships.

Summing Up The context and overall language of Scripture suggests that the one-flesh bond spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 is essentially a lifelong kinship bond. The prophetic tradition in the Old Testament deepens the Bible’s understanding of this bond by speaking of God’s faithfulness to Israel as a marriage bond, emphasizing grace and lifelong faithfulness. This emphasis on kinship and bonding is reflected in each New Testament text that refers back to Genesis 2: 24. The biblical usage suggests that this emphasis on bonding (“ one flesh”) constitutes the essence of marriage, even where the procreative meaning of marriage cannot be fulfilled. This focus on the bonding implicit in becoming one flesh is the basis for the Bible’s categorical rejection of all forms of sexual promiscuity. People are not to say with their bodies what they cannot or will not say with the whole of their lives. It is clear that Scripture assumes that this one-flesh bond only takes place between a man and a woman. Yet there is nothing inherent in the biblical usage that would necessarily exclude committed gay or lesbian unions from consideration as one-flesh unions, when the essential characteristics of one-flesh unions as kinship bonds are held clearly in view. Therefore, what is normal in the biblical witness may not necessarily be normative in different cultural settings that are not envisioned by the biblical writers.

The scholarly consensus today is that, at their essence, men, too, have strong nurturant needs and women, too, have strong assertiveness needs.

The essence of a fallen world is that [in marriage] the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called “self-realization” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence . . .), but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriages entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man, there is no escape. — J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to his son Michael Tolkien

Parvati is one of the strong goddesses. She’s also a goddess of love, with a seductive radiance directed at her beloved, yet at the same time focused inward, on her own essence. She’s a mother. She’s a yogini, a seeker of truth who inquires deeply into the nature of reality. She’s powerful and she’s tender, she’s willful and she’s playful—both at the same time. Moreover, Parvati is a goddess of relatedness. When you tune in to Parvati, you tune in to your own longing for sacred partnership. Parvati incarnates the feminine side of a form of marriage that many modern romantics crave: the union between the fully realized feminine and the fully realized masculine, the dance of intimacy where two powerful beings become one without sacrificing their individuality. Parvati’s image in bronze often shows her dancing, large-breasted, sinuous, and somehow mischievous with coy, lowered eyes. She represents the dynamic feminine in active partnership with her beloved masculine counterpart. Since her beloved is the notoriously untamable outsider-god Shiva, there’s an element of danger and illicit delight in their relationship, a quality of mystery that makes even their domesticity seem fraught with potential chaos. Parvati confidently embraces the great void where no forms exist. She fills it with her blissful presence, and voilà—that formless emptiness becomes a cozy plenum, a space in which life can flourish. Parvati can know the unknowable, tame

[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]

If you’re not in touch with your sensuality, in essence, what you’re saying is I will not let any man express his true potential and therefore win in life. This also means, you don’t want to be served and adored.

But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.

Conflict resolution, be it between partners or the members of the united nations, is in essence very simple. There where are two parties is in reality but one partnering with itself (and leaving space between itself) so not to be by itself and this for the purpose of companionship, friendship, love. The good news is that this knowledge can also be used in interpersonal relationships be it with family, friends and loved ones. Best is to always come back to a single truth. Truth is that all this is self and that the purpose of self is love which is why self is diverse to begin with.

That is the essence of women’s sin natures in marriage. They often become stubbornly defiant and refuse to receive input from God or their husbands concerning issues in their lives and marriages.

Genuine friendship cannot be separated from the personality, essence and nature of the friend as a person.

And that seems to be the essence of our marriage sometimes. He lies to me because he thinks I won’t ever know the difference.

It is necessary to restrain the bull in us in order to elevate it to the Bull. This means to say that the instinctive desire which shows itself as rage concentrated upon a single thing, and which blinds one to everything else, is to be restrained and thus elevated to the propensity for profound meditation. This entire operation is summarized in Hermeticism by the words "to be silent". The precept "to be silent" is not, as many authors interpret it, solely a rule of prudence, but it is moreover a practical method of transforming this narrowing and blinkering instinct into a propensity towards depth and, correspondingly, an aversion towards all that is superficial in nature. The winged Bull is therefore the result obtained by the procedure of "being silent". This means to say that the Bull is elevated to the level of the Eagle and united with it. A marriage of the impetus towards the heights and the propensity towards depth is effected by this union. The marriage of opposites - this traditional theme of alchemy - is the essence of the practice of the law of the Cross.

It is necessary to restrain the bull in us in order to elevate it to the Bull. This means to say that the instinctive desire which shows itself as rage concentrated upon a single thing, and which blinds one to everything else, is to be restrained and thus elevated to the propensity for profound meditation. This entire operation is summarized in Hermeticism by the words "to be silent". The precept "to be silent" is not, as many authors interpret it, solely a rule of prudence, but it is moreover a practical method of transforming this narrowing and blinkering instinct into a propensity towards depth and, correspondingly, an aversion towards all that is superficial in nature. The winged Bull is therefore the result obtained by the procedure of "being silent.: This means to say that the Bull is elevated to the level of the Eagle and united with it. A marriage of the impetus towards the heights and the propensity towards depth is effected by this union. The marriage of opposites - this traditional them of alchemy - is the essence of the practice of the law of the Cross.

Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law. The precise proportions of the mixture are the result of processes: choices, alliances, compromises, rivalries. Fascism in action looks much more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.2

We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

You need to embrace your partner, including his flaws, and not be so arrogant to think you don’t have flaws yourself. In hindsight, I think maybe we had to grow apart to grow together. My experience was groundbreaking for me personally, but our experience together illuminated where we lacked compassion for each other. I was all wrapped up in compassion, but I wasn’t being entirely compassionate with him. Loving the essence of the other person allowed us to pull through this.

The political left’s cultural revolution on the sexual-gender-family front is ubiquitous, as is its intolerance of any dissenters. We see it in the culture of fear and intimidation by the self-prided forces of “diversity” and “tolerance” who viciously seek to denounce, dehumanize, demonize, and destroy anyone who disagrees with their brazen newfound conceptions of marriage and family, even as their inventions are at odds with the prevailing position of 99.99 percent-plus of human beings who have bestrode the earth since the dawn of humanity. Instead, traditional Christians are the ones portrayed as the outliers, as abnormal, as extremists, as bigots, as “haters.” That is a fundamental transformation of a culture and a nation. That is evidence of a true revolution by the heirs of Marx and other radicals. “The Most Radical Rupture in Traditional Relations” To “fundamentally transform.” Here was, in essence, an inherently Marxist goal declared to a sea of oblivious Americans, whether Barack Obama explicitly or fully understood or meant it himself. It is highly doubtful that Obama had Marx (or a Marcuse or Millett or Reich) on the mind at that moment.665 Obama was merely riding a wave that began as a ripple over a century or so ago. And typically, most of those surfing or floating along have little notion who or what helped give the initial push. Nonetheless, the goal of Karl Marx and the Marxist project from the outset was one of fundamental transformation, permanent revolution, and unrestrained criticism of everything—nothing less than “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.”666 Marx’s ideas were so radical, and so (as Marx openly conceded) “contrary to the nature of things,” that they inevitably lead to totalitarianism; that is because they are totalitarian in the strictest sense, as they seek to transform human nature and the foundational order. We have seen passages from Marx to that effect throughout this book. Here is a short summary: Marx in the Manifesto said that communism represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.” Marx in the Manifesto acknowledged that communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things.” Marx in the Manifesto stated that “they [the Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Marx in the close of the Manifesto: “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Marx in a letter to Arnold Ruge called for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” Marx had a favorite quote from Goethe’s Faust, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” • Marx in his essay declaring religion “the opium of the people” said that “the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.” (Recall that in that essay he used the word “criticism” twenty-nine times.) Beyond

When the practitioner remains present with the prana and is not wavering, then they have realized the marriage of the authentic state of one’s being which is space, and wisdom: ying and yeshe. These two elements, which constitute the authentic state of one’s being, cannot be brought together, and because of that they cannot be separated—they function in the state of totality of one’s authentic condition where both elements are present.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens observed that part of the strain of modernity results from our becoming “disembedded” from the traditional institutions of church, neighborhood, marriage, community, and gender. In its stead has been left an intensely personal, day-to-day, moment-to-moment appraisal of the self: its moods, desires, thoughts, and aspirations. This self-appraising project requires constant monitoring. How much or how little to engage with others—with friends, with romantic partners? Do they satisfy our ambition of self-actualization? “Personal growth,” writes Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, “depends on conquering emotional blocks and tensions that prevent us from understanding ourselves as we really are.” Social psychologist Eli Finkel’s observation of what is required for a successful marriage today also mirrors Giddens’s observation: “Success typically requires not only compatibility but also deep insight into each other’s core essence, the sort of insight that helps us know what type of support is most beneficial under which circumstances.” I say, ditto parenting adult children.

When one helps out with a chore, the other intentionally reciprocates, and so on. In essence, the couple function with an unwritten agreement to offer recompense for each kind word or deed.

Marriage is God’s doing because it was his design in the creation of man as male and female. This was made plain earlier in Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’” But it is also clear here in the flow of thought in Genesis 2. In verse 18, it is God himself who decrees that man’s solitude is not good, and it is God himself who sets out to complete one of the central designs of creation, namely, man and woman in marriage. “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Don’t miss that central and all-important statement: God himself will make a being perfectly suited for him—a wife. Then he parades the animals before Adam so that he might see there is no creature that qualifies. This creature must be made uniquely from man so that she will be of his essence—a fellow human being in God’s image, just as Genesis 1:27 said. So we read in verses 21–22, “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman.” God made her. This text ends in verses 24–25 with the words, “They shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” In other words, this is all moving toward marriage. So the first thing to say about marriage being God’s doing is that marriage was his design in creating man male and female.

Thus marriage, like the Trinity, is a hierarchical partnership. While all parties are equal in value, essence, and significance, there is a distinction in function (hierarchy) in order to fulfill God’s kingdom agenda in history.

[T]he contradiction in Catholicism, that at the same time marriage is holy and celibacy is holy. This simply realises as a practical contradiction, the dogmatic contradiction of the Virgin Mother. … [T]his wondrous union of virginity and maternity, contradicting Nature and reason, but in the highest degree accordant with the feelings and imagination, … The supranatural conception of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, … As death [was] repugnant to the Christians, and … set aside by them through the supposed agency of miraculous power; so, necessarily, they had an equal repugnance to the natural processes of generation, and superseded it by miracle. The Miraculous Conception is not less welcome than the Resurrection to all believers; for it was the first step towards the purification of mankind, polluted by sin and Nature.

We have been conditioned by today's advertising to respond instantly to the word "housewife" with the word "drudgery". ... A creative Counterpart is more than just a helper. She is a woman who having chosen (or have found herself in) the vocation of wife and mother, decides to learn and grow in all the areas this role and to work as hard as if she were aiming for the presidency of corporation. Functioning as a professional in all areas of marriage is the essence of being a creative counterpart.

It was a simple game. The goal was to “give away” all of your checkers by putting them in a position to be jumped and captured by the other player. The first one to “give away” all of his checkers was declared the winner. In essence, you won by losing. I didn’t know it at the time, but my dad was teaching me a powerful lesson about the marketplace, marriage, and ministry — because in each of these important arenas, those who give away the most end up gaining the most.

Wealthy people so often find that the summit of their mountains - the success that they sought - isn’t enough. And they are right. It isn’t enough to satisfy our deep hunger for meaning and purpose. (And we will talk about that later on.) In essence, you have got to build your house on good foundations - on rock, not sand - and money as a goal in itself will never satisfy you. So choose wisely. And be careful what you wish for. When you start putting the correct steps into place, good things will start to happen. So you have got to be prepared for the success when it comes. Money can make the path more comfortable, but it will never remove the potholes. The billionaire John Paul Getty famously said: ‘I would give everything I own for one happy marriage.’ That is pretty telling. Money doesn’t solve all your ills. In fact, money, like success, tends, instead, to magnify your life - and if you are living with the wrong values, money will make things much worse. Conversely, if you get it right, money can be an incredible blessing. So always keep referring back to page 15 at the start of this book. Look at your dream. Never lose sight of it, because if you attain it, you will be rich beyond measure…and I’m not talking dollars and cents.

In the days of old, when one married, they're given a breathing space to bond with each other for days or weeks—free from many activities. They're treated with kindness, affections and love—even offered with many services as in house chores and others. This was (is) not an European thing. In the Bible, God told the Israelites not to allow a man who has married to go for war. He's to stay home for a year for certain activities. In our era, we referred to the above scenario as Honeymoon. Now the questions: —Are we to go or not to? —Is it beneficial or not? —Is it a money wasting venture or not? —Is it part of the marriage preparation or not? —Does it do anything to the marriage or not? —And above all, what is its essence for us(family or humanity), couples and posterity?

He called them women (an-nisâ') which is a plural which does not have a singular form. For that reason, he said, "He made me love three things in your world: women..." and he did not say, "woman". He took note of the fact that they came after him in existence. The word an- nisa' also means postponement. Allah says, "The month postponed is an increase in disbelief," (9:37) and the sale of "nasi'a" is said to be by postponement, that is, by credit. That is why he said an-nisa'. He loved them only by rank, and they are the place of the passive. They are to him as nature is to Allah in which Allah opened the forms of the world by the projection of the will and the divine command which is marriage in the world of elemental forms, and aspiration (himma) in the world of luminous spirits, as in the order of premises and their meanings through deduction. All of that is the marriage of the first uniqueness in each of these aspects. Whoever loves women in this measure, loves with a divine love. Whoever loves them in respect to natural appetite in particular, deprives himself of the knowledge of this appetite. For him it is a form without a spirit (rûh). That form in the heart of the matter is the essence of a spirit, but it is not witnessed by the one who comes to his wife or any woman by pure gratification, and he does not perceive the one it is for even so, he has no knowledge of himself, as others have no knowledge of him, since he has not been verbally named so that he could be known.

When man witnesses Allah in women, his witnessing is in the passive; when he witnesses Him in himself, regarding the appearance of woman from Him, he witnesses Him in the active. When he witnesses Him from himself without the presence of any form from him, his witnessing is in the passive directly from Allah without any intermediary. So his witnessing of Allah in the woman is the most complete and perfect because he witnesses Allah inasmuch as He is both active and passive. Regarding himself, He is passive in particular. For this reason, the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, loved women because of the perfection of the witnessing of Allah in them since one does not ever witness Allah free of matter. Allah by His essence is independent of the worlds. So from this aspect, the business is impossible, yet witnessing only occurs in matter. The witnessing of Allah in women is the greatest and most perfect witnessing. The greatest union is marriage.

The act of focusing is not simply the mental equivalent of gazing intently at an object. It is a confluence, a harmonious marriage of mind, heart, and will, an alignment akin to a troupe of actors on a stage, each playing their part, but all moving in harmony towards the climax of the play. This is the essence of true focus.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Volume 3. Pg 215-216 "...the Old Testament is also to be viewed as one in essence and substance wth the New Testament. For though God communicates his revelation successively and historically and makes it progressively richer and fuller, and humankind therefore advances in the knowledge, possession, and enjoyment of revelation, God is and remains the same. The sun only gradually illumines the earth, but itself remains the same, morning and evening, during the day and at night. Although Christ completed his work on earth only in the midst of history and although the Holy Spirit was not poured out till the day of Pentecost, God nevertheless was able, already in the days of the Old Testament, to full distribute the benefits to be acquired and applied by the Son and the Spirit. Old Testament believers were saved in no other way than we. There is one faith, one Mediator, one way of salvation, and one covenant of grace." Page 221-222 "The benefits granted to Israel by God in this covenant (Sinai) are the same as those granted to Abraham, but more detailed and specialized. Genesis 3:15 already contains the entire covenant in a nutshell and all the benefits of grace. God breaks the covenant made by the first humans with Satan, puts enmity between them, brings the first humans over to his side, and promises them victory over the power of the enemy. The one great promise to Abraham is "I will be your God, and you and your descendants will be my people" *Gen 17:8 paraphrase). And this is the principle content of God's covenant with Israel as well. God is Israel's God, and Israel is his people (Exod 19:6; 29:46; etc.). Israel, accordingly, receives a wide assortment of blessings, not only temporal blessings, such as the land of Canaan, fruitfulness in marriage, a long life, prosperity, plus victory over its enemies, but also spiritual and eternal blessings, such as God's dwelling among them (Exod. 29:45; Lev. 26:12), the forgiveness of sins (Exod. 20:6, 34:7; Num. 14:18; Deut. 4:31; Pss. 32; 103; etc.), sonship (Exod. 4:22; 19:5-6, 20:2; Deut. 14:1; Isa 63:16; Amos 3:1-2; etc.), sanctification (Exod. 19:6, Lev. 11:44, 19:2), and so on. All these blessings, however, are not as plainly and clearly pictured in the Old Testament as in the New Testament. At that time they would not have been grasped and understood in their spiritual import. The natural is first, then the spiritual. All spiritual and eternal benefits are therefore clothed, in Israel, in sensory forms. The forgiveness of sins is bound to animal sacrifices. God's dwelling in Israel is symbolized in the temple built on Zion. Israel's sonship is primarily a theocratic one, and the expression "people of God" has not only a religious but also a national meaning. Sanctification in an ethical sense is symbolized in Levitical ceremonial purity. Eternal life, to the Israelite consciousness, is concealed in the form of a long life on earth. It would be foolish to think that the benefits of forgiveness and sanctification, of regeneration and eternal life, were therefore objectively nonexistent in the days of the Old Testament. They were definitely granted then as well by Christ, who is eternally the same....The spiritual an eternal clothed itself in the form of the natural and temporal. God himself, Elohim, Creator of heaven and earth, as Yahweh, the God of the covenant, came down to the level of the creature, entered into history, assumed human language, emotions, and forms, in order to communicate himself with all his spiritual blessings to humans and so to prepare for his incarnation, his permanent and eternal indwelling in humanity. We would not even have at our disposal words with which to name the spiritual had not the spiritual first revealed itself in the form of the natural.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the true purpose of marriage is none other than talking, and this is not only precisely what distinguishes it from other types of personal relationships but also what is most missed: the trivial conversations about everything from the neighbor’s bad mood to how ugly a friend’s daughter is. Pointless and none too insightful observations are the essence of intimacy, what we mourn after the death of our wives, our fathers, our friends. A few months after Maia’s death I was