It is December and the great gray whales are headed south on their annual pilgrimage from arctic waters to Scammon's Lagoon and the warm beaches of Baja. It is a mating and calving journey that has punctuated the lives of these great beasts from time immemorial.
Humankind has its own migrations and rituals. In the Shan States of Burma, nubile maidens of the Karen tribes dance in the light of the full August moon. Spirited away by suitors from faraway tribes, most never see their first homes again.
Today we are much more "sophisticated," with phones, jet planes and flowers-by-phone florists. Yet the impulses are much the same: finding that special partner, cementing another pair of bricks in the fabric of human society (rocks, if you dislike the implied monotony of bricks), providing for the replenishment of humankind.
For believers, raise the sights; what is in construction is the City of God. On their journeys they attend Bible conferences to reaffirm their own faith and, in the fellowship of the saints, affirm the universality of the church. And a vital part of this universality, of being part of something so much greater than oneself, is the vesting of our young in that same fabric, to succeed and outlive us.
Where is a pattern for this? The love story of Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis 24. Abraham sends his trusted servant, Eliezer, to find a bride for his son Isaac. Eliezer, bound under solemn patrilineal oath, moves with remarkable single-mindedness, grace and wisdom. The surrogate suitor returns with "his" prize; she falls in love with Isaac, and the two live "happily ever after.”
Spiritually, we get from the story a hint of the three Persons of the Godhead engaged in the grand business of winning a bride—the church—for Christ. For the preacher of the gospel, it is a lovely vision of the wooing of the Spirit, and of Rebekah's decisive assent to the question, "Wilt thou go with this man?" Morally, it is a remarkable picture of intergenerational cohesiveness and filial obedience.
The scene where Isaac, solo, meditates in the field at eventide has a universal poignancy—a yearning laced with filial piety. What young man come to years has not felt the emptiness-amidst-abundance, the loneliness-in-a-crowd, the longing for that unseen stranger, across a crowded room, on some enchanted evening. Socially—in austere social compact of the sere, unforgiving desert—the next generation is provided for, made place for, the bricks set solidly in place, cemented, grouted and pointed. Life, according to promise, will go on.
Is Genesis 24 a pattern for twentieth-century believers and their family life? "Thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the...Canaanites" is a warning well heeded today. But how does a parent go about it? By playing the patriarch? Not today in Western nations does:
• a bride go sight-unseen to a stranger,
• a parent and a hired man arrange a marriage,
• a groom have no choice but to marry his cousin,
• and what about fathers that aren't millionaires?
The idea of a family-arranged marriage seems quaint to us, grown up in the Western romantic tradition of love triumphant—overcoming distance, poverty, storm of sea, mountain heights, warfare, and even parental opposition. While we reject the fantasies of Hollywood, we celebrate free choice. Heirs of the liberation brought by Gutenberg, Luther, Milton and the founding fathers, we are not easily dictated to in matters of conscience and the heart.
The long-distance romance offers surprise, the exotic, the far away. But it offers little time to check out the myriad congruence’s, or lack of them, the jigsaw puzzle—social, intellectual, emotional, financial and "kitchenal" that will ease the matrimonial fit. (Did you ever buy a pair of gloves by mail order?)
Still, a hallmark of youth is its plasticity: at 201 adapt; at 40 I am an old, crusty bachelor. And offspring—the politely unstated purpose of all this nest-building—the offspring of the tong-distance romance will almost certainly grow up without the good offices, the final cementing and grouting, of at least one pair of grandparents. These last can help put the stamp of family character on the young-can help with the "spirituals" while parents are busy feeding youngsters and patching bruises.
Most of all, the long-distance romance offers ample time to meditate, solo—to ponder the question, "Can I live my life without this woman?" Young man, don't neglect that vital question inside yourself, to meditate at eventide, and to await that longed-for gift, not from parents, but from the Father
C. D. Lunden