The Truth about Marriage/Chapter43
CHAPTER XLIII
MARRIAGES IN HEAVEN
Someone asks, "What about the statement that there are no marriages in heaven?"
All true marriages are made here by the processes of experience. We come by growth into true and perfect marriage. Two people may meet here and love each other and be married, and yet it may take years of living together to come into the closer interior union that makes the highest ideal of marriage.
But they may never meet here. Yet they have been fitted by life itself for one another and find themselves hereafter so adapted to one another as to realize a perfect union. The marriage, as far as adaptation is concerned, is always made here. I am not responsible for this idea. It came from Swedenborg. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning embodied it in some very beautiful poetry.
Thus all marriages are made on earth, though all are not realized here. Do you believe it?
When you think of your father and mother or other loved ones in the other life, do you not think of them as married? Do you think that family relationships are broken up when all meet again in the hereafter? Of course, you believe that your father and mother continue married if they truly love each other and want to live together; otherwise not; they find their true mates.
And so you will find your true mate; possibly here; certainly hereafter. But does it not seem reasonable to think that we do not lose our sense of human relationships when we pass out of this life into the real world of the hereafter?
What is marriage? Is it not a union of two congenial people of the opposite sex, congenial in tastes and thoughts and feelings and aspirations? Is it not a union of true minds in a holy bond? Why should not such a bond be permanent if it is desired? Do we ever cease to be human beings, even if we live after death? It would be worth nothing at all to us to live after death without our loved ones.
Marriage is not mere physical union. That is the least part of it, even though so many seem to think that there is nothing else to it. When people are united by mutual tastes and thoughts and feelings and experiences and aspirations as man and wife they are truly married. And especially when they are united as to spirit as well as to mere outward thoughts and feelings.
This view gives infinite comfort to those who have never married here. And also to those who have been unhappily married. According to Swedenborg we are all destined for a perfect marriage hereafter, whatever our experience of marriage or lack of it here, dependent of course upon our capacity to enter into such an ideal relationship.
Now what I look forward to is the education of people for marriage so that they will understand it beforehand, and will then try to understand their own nature and the nature of the person who interests them as a possible mate.
How much better it is to find out the true nature of the other person before one marries them than afterwards! It can be done in most cases. It is not necessary to go through the agony of an unhappy marriage to do so. If our ignorance were enlightened as to the true nature of marriage, as to ourselves and as to other people, we could avoid mistakes.
Why not set out definitely to bring about the education of young people for marriage?
It is a thousand times better than trial marriage. That is utterly abhorrent to one's finer nature. It is only physical marriage. It is giving up one's body without one's real self, and that is desecration.