Toward a certain myrtle wreath

When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s daughter married her husband, the bride’s bouquet included myrtle. Queen Victoria had planted the myrtle that Prince Albert’s grandmother had given her in a posey. Descendants of that very same plant are still being tended in the same place to this day, and sprigs of myrtle have graced the bouquets of many a royal wedding since. Just so, for myrtle is a symbol of fidelity.

While the secular world celebrates what it calls Pride Month, Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University calls for June to be Fidelity Month. The movement has adopted for its symbol a myrtle wreath. Who and what are worthy of our fidelity, in this our supremely decadent and cynical age? Our answer must be always the same: God, our spouses, and families, our communities and country, and our churches.

Let me here focus on two of these arenas of fidelity—marriage and children. Pride Month in June means many things, not the least of which is a monstrous offspring of infidelity to our marriage and children. It is right, then, to reclaim our fidelity to them.

In the West, the institution of marriage has undergone a desacralization and a contractualization. In our time, it is easier to walk away from our spouses than to get out of our cell-phone contracts, because no-fault divorce allows for any or no reason at all to get divorced. If marriage used to be a weighty institution in the West, perhaps it was not unrelated to the view many Christians have had of marriage as a sacrament. Desacralization is exactly what has happened to marriage in our culture.

The covenantal view of marriage is still held by Christians, and certainly it is still a symbol of Christ and His Church. But the contractualization of marriage threatens to supplant the covenant, the gaunt swallowing the healthy.

Matrimony by its nature has to do with children, as the etymology instructs. The Latin matrimonium, from mater and monium, means mother-making. Perhaps it is no surprise that the contractualization of marriage has infected our modern view of our children. Now some treat our children as (luxury) goods to buy and sell, like with the buying and selling of the sperm and eggs to manufacture them, or with the renting of the womb to gestate them.

But what is it that we owe our spouses, our children? What is our duty to them? Too much of our thinking and discourse have to do with the chosenness of our relationships—that contractualization again. We only want to do what we signed up for: thus and no more. We only want to pour into the relationships we choose. We want it easy.

But, of course, we don’t get to choose our children (or shouldn’t). And we may have chosen our spouses, but they change over time. (As do we!) Maybe they’re less likeable with time, or God forbid, maybe their character grows worse. Maybe they lose their possessions, or maybe they get very sick. Certainly they get older, as do we. If “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish” means anything at all, it has to mean that we will be faithful to our spouses come what may—“till death us do part.” The opposite of faithfulness, then, is faithlessness, a breaking faith with our spouses or children, a giving up on them.

So it would be good for us to dwell, rather, on the givenness of our marriage and children (and the quality of their being gifts to us, not entitlements), and on our unchosen obligations to them.

Fidelity is a quiet virtue. It is about ordinary faithfulness, a steadiness of the will—and because of that the heart: day in, day out, in season and out of season. It requires forbearance—even longsuffering.

At root, fidelity has to do with fiducia, or confidence: a giving of ourselves into the hands of the Lord. We are faithful in our vocations as husband, wife, father, and mother, because ultimately, we are confident in God, just and merciful and good. Our fidelity is with a fixed eye toward the Master, from whose lips one day may we hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

For who knows? Might that crown of life for the faithful unto death be a myrtle wreath? Fidelity is not just for a month, but for eternity.