Black Marriage Day A Celebration of Suffering
Black Marriage Day is the 28th of March. What to wear? What to wear? Though I'm neither black nor married (with no prospects even), I'm pretty excited about it.
Some 300 communities across the country will celebrate the joys of marriage with various events, such as vow renewal ceremonies, marriage workshops, black tie galas and the premier of two marriage-related movies, You Saved Me and Why Did I Get Married Too?.
This trailer for You Save Me is well-crafted and touching. The movie chronicles the tribulations of eight black couples in their successful struggles to stay together.
Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? seems appropriately heavy as well.
Black Marriage Day is part of a larger effort, that includes the federal government's African American Healthy Marriage Initiative, aimed at increasing black marriage rates to bring them in line with other ethnicities.
While African-Americans may marry less and divorce and bear children out of wedlock more, with an overall divorce rate in the United States perennially hovering around 50%, most would agree all segments of society have room for improvement.
You Saved Me may hold the key for all marriages. "What did your spouse save you from?" asks one of the wives in the trailer. That's a great question.
Popular spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, in his first book The Power of Now, writes:
As you may have noticed, [relationships] . . . are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation. [bold original]
What can our spouses save us from? Unconsciousness and the suffering it causes ourselves and our loved ones.
Through the everyday and constant compromise and sacrifice that close contact with someone so fundamentally different from us inevitably generates, we are led either to leave with our egos intact, or to seek answers from the ether to help us stick it out.
Another spiritual teacher taught that when we seek in this way, we find. By consciously enduring the suffering, we come to realize that it is self-created, thereby ending the illusion of the ego's power over our lives.
We then choose to step out of the pleasure-pain cycle and find ourselves free to love our spouses again. And why wouldn't we? They're helping us to become better people.
What's not to love about Black Marriage Day? Let us all join in this homage to suffering, at least in spirit.
Photo credit: Smooth Brown Skin
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