THE BEST MAN’S DILEMMA-Purity Laws [Su, 12-20-20]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

 

[Today is the 67^th wedding anniversary of Don and Gloria [Richeson] Survant. Don died in 2012. The column below is not about Don & Gloria, but I want to honor them on this, their anniversary day. Don was the friend of my teen years that I could always count on, who always had my back. He stood by me, in any circumstance, and I stood up with him, 67 years ago today. It’s also appropriate today, because soon, Dec. 25, we shall celebrate the birth of a baby conceived out of wedlock.]

THE BEST MAN’S DILEMMA-Purity Laws [Su, 12-20-20]

[I found the picture online. It’s not of anyone I know, but it’s also of every wedding couple in the 1950s.]

I had a lot of good friends in high school, several of whom were really close, guys I played ball with, ran around with, shared hopes and dreams with, tried to pick up girls with. When they got married, they asked me to be the best man at their weddings. I felt very good about that. I loved having friends, friends who thought enough of me to have me by their side at their most important moments.

Except when one friend--I’ll call him Brad, since there was no one named Brad in those days—told me that he and his girlfriend—I’ll call her Whitney since there was no one named Whitney in those days—were going to get married and he wanted me to stand up with him, except he understood if I didn’t want to, since they “had to get married.”

I felt greatly honored, to be selected for such a significant role, and honored, also, that Brad respected my religiousness. Even though I felt honored, I felt disappointed and confused. Did people, even a close friend like Brad, see me as the kind of narrow-minded Christian who would put adherence to a purity law ahead of friendship? Put rules ahead of people? Did he really think I would refuse to be his best man because he’d had sex “outside of marriage?”

That was the only way you were supposed to have sex at all back then, inside the commitment of marriage. That was the Christian way. Because of the Bible. The Bible, like it so often is, was just a convenient reason. The prohibition against sex outside of marriage was actually because of the risk of pregnancy outside of marriage. The sex prohibition was protection for unwed girls and bastard babies.  Our general acceptance of when sex was acceptable changed with “the pill,” when pregnancy was not a possibility every time a girl or woman had sex.

But we didn’t realize in the 1950s that our “sex only in marriage” rule was primarily a cultural constraint to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We were told that sex had always been wrong outside of marriage. {And there are enough other reasons why sex outside of marriage is bad/wrong to make such a claim at least plausible.}

It’s so nice to have clear definitions, isn’t it? If the difference is married or not-married, well, you know if you’re married. Our current approach to sex is more realistic than the “marriage only” approach, and it includes more people than the old paradigm, including people who can’t marry for one reason or another, but it’s a lot harder now to say for sure when sex is okay, and joy-full [rather than merely pleasurable] and relationship-building, and when it is exploitative or abusive or just plain cheap.

Who’s a Christian? It’s nice to have clear definitions of that, too. I wanted to be a Christian, and that meant that I went to church. I did not swear or drink or smoke or tell or laugh at dirty jokes or disrespectful comments about people, either individually or as a group. I did not treat girls as lesser people or sex objects.

But did I come across as self-righteous in my attempt to be Christian? Probably so, if a close friend like Brad would think I’d put rules ahead of people.

Nonetheless, I think Brad wasn’t really doubting my friendship when he said he would understand if I didn’t want to be his best man. I think he knew I would come through. He was being respectful when he gave me an “out.”

In giving me that out, though, he gave me a gift. He let me know that when you keep the rules, you have to let folks know that you keep the friends, too. Since then, I have always tried to “keep” the friends by keeping the rules. When Bishop Leroy Hodapp named me to the committee of our Conference to investigate wrong doing by clergy, he said he wanted me on that committee “because every sinner needs at least one friend.”

I still struggle with the problem of law vs grace. I like the purity laws. They keep me out of trouble. They give me purpose and satisfaction. They make me happy. But if you keep the purity laws, do you come across as some sort of stiff-necked, self-righteous prig who doesn’t know the difference between keeping rules in order to be happy in one’s self and respectful to others, or keeping rules just to keep rules?

Brad and Whitney had a long and happy marriage together. I still feel honored that I got to stand up with them right at the beginning.

John Robert McFarland

“Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” Barbara Brown Taylor