Are you a spiritual person? If you are, then you can appreciate that spirituality can help you during difficult situations. But let me clarify a moment what I mean by spirituality. In my mind, spirituality is both the practice of religion and the belief in religion. I don’t believe one has to attend a regular religious event in order to be spiritual. I know many people who are spiritual and they would not term themselves as religious.
Spirituality in Marriage
I’ve discussed the topic of spirituality in marriage before. But today I want to look at it from a slightly different angle. I want to look at how the spirituality of your spouse can provide you with a great buffer from the outside world and its associated problems. I want to share with you a story of a couple that I knew growing up and how their relationship inspired me.
Mariann and Luke
Luke and Mariann were married 24 years ago. I attended their wedding because Mariann worked with my grandmother. They were a very kind couple and they were very fun. I suppose they were in the early twenties and they were both still in school. Neither had a career path selected, but they both enjoyed educating themselves.
Twice when I visited their home as a teenager, they were always studying something new. Mariann spoke four languages by the time I was 16 and Luke spoke three. They practiced together and when they found out I was learning Spanish in school, they refused to talk to me in anything but Spanish. It was pretty fun at the time.
What I didn’t know then, but I learned as I grew older – Mariann was a very spiritual woman. Her maternal grandparents were Native American, Sioux, I believe. She was raised on a tradition of storytelling and nature beliefs. She embraced that tradition and maintained it throughout her youth and into her adulthood. She told me once, that the reason she wanted to learn languages is that you could learn more about a people through their language than you can through their translations.
Her Faith Sustained
She described her beliefs as simple and ordinary. Luke described them as extraordinary and profound. His family’s religious activities had always been minimal. He did not understand the depth of her comfort with herself and her faith until she was diagnosed with lupus. Lupus is a disorder where the body’s immune system attacks itself.
He was deeply angry at life for having done this to his wife. They were just 25 and ready to embark on a great journey of life and they wanted many children. Mariann’s doctors recommended against pregnancy due to her condition. Luke’s anger evaporated in the face of Mariann’s acceptance and even comfort with her condition. She described it as an opportunity – an opportunity to make every moment of their lives worth living – to explore the world around them and to learn its stories.
Their Journey
Because of her spirituality and her faith, Luke discovered that there were others way of looking at the world and while he didn’t necessarily share her beliefs, her beliefs inspired him. When they moved away, I was 21, but I remember my grandmother telling me what they had decided to do.
They spoke 4 languages between them and they were learning two more. They were going to travel as far as they could, to as many countries as they could and learn as much as they could. Mariann wanted to immerse herself into their culture. The last time we heard from them, they were living in Okinawa after having spent time in Rome, Crete, Berlin, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro.
Her spirituality and her faith has given Luke his and they are living a life of dreams. You don’t need to be a spiritual person to benefit from the spirituality of others. Does you take comfort in the spirituality of your spouse?
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