The Mystery of Marriage Quotes

“so the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“Love coaxes and even hood-winks us into the making of a decision so radical that if left to our own devices we would never have entertained it for a moment.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“As long as the self is consumed in the struggle to make itself lovely, it cannot love. First it must come to the end of its own resources, for the power to love derives purely and solely from the knowledge that one is already loved in return.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“How I thank God, then, that from the start He has given me a loving wife to be my best friend of all. She is (as the poem at the end of the book suggests) my monastery. For having set out in the Christian life to become a monk, I found myself instead falling in love with a woman. At first I worried intensely that I’d made a huge mistake, fallen prey to a terrible temptation. But what a surprise it was to discover, over the years, that as a married man (and a father too) I have become more and more a true monk than I ever could have been within the walls of a monastery. How is this? It’s because love, true love, sets people free to be whoever they are.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one’s living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going––to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door––the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic; but also, let’s face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“The taking of vows is an act of faith. If people were faithful by nature, vows would not be necessary; their yes would be yes and their no would be no. But it is because people are not inherently faithful nor honest nor loving that they must stand up and declare they will be.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between the partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle