“A helpful way for me to understand this business of very limited horizons is to picture all of us living inside our own barrels. Inside our barrels, we are crowded with ourselves. We have two little peep holes through which we can look out from our barrels upon a much bigger world.
Inside my barrel, I am crowded with myself. Outside my barrel, the world is crowded with life. Inside my barrel, I define my world by my experiences. Outside my barrel, the world is filled with all its wonder and diversity. Inside my barrel, I choke on myself. Outside my barrel, the world overflows like a fountain of life. Inside my barrel, I measure my world by myself. Outside my barrel, there beckons a world waiting to take the measure of me.
Inside my barrel, I try to construct a world that gives me security. Outside my barrel, the world beckons me to live beyond the horizons of my own security. Inside my barrel, I convince myself that I can control life. Outside my barrel, I see a world that is sometimes chaotic and needs my help to bring order to it. Inside my barrel, I huddle in fear of who I am. Outside my barrel, I am amazed to see free spirits who seem to dance among the stars -- unafraid.
Inside my barrel, I tell myself the lies I want to hear. Outside my barrel, there are other truths, even bigger truths that would challenge the comfort of my lies. Inside my barrel, the light is darkness. Outside my barrel, the light is revealing and sometimes blinding. Inside my barrel, I convince myself how small life is. Outside my barrel, I glimpse a vast landscape crowded with a complexity of different paths in rich diversity. Inside my barrel, I pretend that I do not need the world. Outside my barrel, a world confronts me with the unsettling fact that it will make do without me. Inside my barrel, I long for companionship. Outside my barrel, there is a world full of companions -- many of them as lonely as I am.
Are we destined, should I say doomed, to live our lives circumscribed by our own barrels? Or can you lift the lid off your barrel and climb out? The predictable cynics among us would growl “'No,” while the perennial optimists among us would shout “Yes!” I will thread my way through these two easy answers and say “Yes and No.” There is a sense in which we can find life outside our barrels. But there is also a sense in which we are limited and defined by our barrels. In one sense we are defined by who we are, living in our own skins with our own unique experiences and history, looking out through the knot holes in our own barrels. Yet in another sense, we are gifted with the possibility of discovering shared life beyond the narrow world of our own cramped selves.
This book is about learning to live in your own barrel, which means learning how to live peaceably and graciously with yourself. But it is more about learning to create a co-personal world in which life is shared in a universe of shared meanings, shared values, shared dreams, shared hopes, shared feelings, and shared experiences beyond the limited horizons of yourself.
How can two very different people, a man and a woman, reach beyond the limitations of their own cramped selves and create a co-personal world?
The focus here on such a co-personal world will be on the life that is shared between a man and a woman in the bonds of covenant love that we call marriage. I am confident, however, there is much discussed here that will also be common to and insightful for other intimate relationships. Much of what I describe will speak to concerns about friendship, about hospitality, and about family. Yet, the primary focus of all that I will say is upon the special relationship of covenant love between a man and a woman within marriage.
Marriage today is under a great deal of pressure. Married couples know all too well how difficult and demanding close up living can be. Unfortunately, too many couples are floundering in their marriage. It is my ambition to help these couples rediscover the joy of living together in the loving, caring, giving and forgiving, intimate relationship of committed, covenant love promised in marriage.
How to Keep Your Love Alive
It has always amazed me how persons who have suffered through a failed marriage will still try again to find happiness within the bonds of marriage. It is as though these people still hold on to the hope and conviction that the promise of a life-long committed relationship is still possible in marriage. So they are ready to try again. The lure of married love seems to attract them, even after they have been “burned” in a previous marriage.
What is it that we expect from marriage? What promise does it hold that keeps drawing us into it? I think people are still looking for a relationship in which they will be loved even on their bad days, will be forgiven when they are not at their best, will be nurtured and bring out the best in each other, and will be comforted and even healed from life’s hurts. That kind of relationship will endure when little else seems to endure.
How can marriage possibly live up to such expectations? Are we expecting too much from marriage? The cynics will answer “Yes.” But I don’t think so. I find it very reassuring that couples are looking for the kind of relationship that the covenant of marriage promises. The key to marriage is understanding the nature of that covenant relationship. A covenant is a bonded relationship that is entered into by two people and is created by the promises they make to each other.”