The rush to get married

Last week I had another wedding. Carolina and Ageu. She is Portuguese, he is Brazilian. She is a physiotherapist, he is a football player. She is Catholic by origin, he is Evangelical. He invited her to go to church, hesitantly at first, and finally went down to the waters of baptism. He was confident and, with his eyes on the prize, moving forward with the courtship and engagement.

Marrying people is one of the best things in the life of an evangelical pastor. It is no wonder that the first substantial thing God did with human beings was to marry them. There was an Adam and the Creator invented an Eve for him. Everything about paradise is said to be good, but it is not good for Adam to be alone. Not even the many little animals he had around him could give him what only his wife would give him later.

It was only when Eve was created that paradise truly became paradise. Without a woman, a man might have plenty to keep him entertained, but we all know that it would not be enough. One of the most fascinating mysteries of the Bible is the detail of a world that was supposedly perfect for Adam but which, in practice, was equally boring. It was only when Eve was created from him, half friend, half adversary, that existence as we know it could truly begin.

The couples we come across still belong to that state of boredom, where fantasies rule more than facts. Everything is will, everything is future, everything is life in potential. We live in a paradise made of the absence of what real paradise will destroy as soon as we live it as a married couple. Marriage takes us to real paradise, which is also paradise lost. It is no coincidence that chapters 1 and 2 of the book of Genesis exist without sin and chapter 3, about married life, brings the fall.

Is this supposed to encourage or discourage someone from getting married? I don't know for sure, but it's part of what is preached in a wedding. When they wanted to get married, Carolina and Ageu rushed into it, and rushing into marriage is part of the phenomenon of simultaneously living and losing paradise. Why do we continue to be afraid of marriage? Because, even if unconsciously, something tells us that it will be very good and that it will be very bad. Basically, it's normal life.

The couples who have recently been getting married at the Lapa Church have been mainly foreigners. Are we Portuguese people particularly afraid of getting married and rushing into the dual experience of gaining and losing paradise? Readers, knowing my propensity for cultural simplifications, can easily guess that I think so. What’s more, I was given a boost by rereading “Portugal Hoje—o medo de existe” by José Gil.

The verb precipitate shares a visible root with the word precipice. We would not be entirely wrong to say that in the context of marriage, Adam and Eve were taken out of paradise, in a kind of beginning of the precipice. We would add, however, that on that very fateful occasion God promised that their marriage, now shadowed, would bear fruit—fruit that nourishes us in the midst of its confusion (and the positive apocalypse becomes the cosmic marriage between Christ and the church).

We need to break free from the boredom of familiar idealizations so that life can happen. Perhaps foreigners, already quite displaced from the comforts of their own homes, will understand the lesson more quickly. Carolina and Ageu were not slow. Their church celebrated the daunting step taken by the Portuguese-Brazilian couple, based on faith. How do you do that? With promises. Being there to celebrate all of this up front is one of the wonders that being an evangelical pastor gives me.