Why didn’t Sinatra sing about sloth and marriage being like a horse and carriage?
In a recent interview, Kathleen Norris speaks about her new book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post:
TOJ: In your book you celebrate marriage but
without the usual evangelical emphasis on the need for it to be perfect
or a place of perfection. Rather, you seemed to celebrate faithfulness
and link it with struggle. There wasn’t an idea that marriage was
something that was perfect; it was something that needed creation—
KN: Oh, yes. It needs a lot of work. I guess I am not
really that familiar with the idea of perfection in marriage. But of
course with the biblical word perfect, when Christ says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”—I wrote about this in Amazing Grace—it
doesn’t mean what we think of as perfectionist or perfection. It means
maturity. Be mature. So in a sense, a perfect marriage is a mature
marriage. One that you’ve allowed to mature, and you’ve matured along
with it. It doesn’t mean what we would think of as perfect, and I think
that if you think of it as perfectionist, you know, everything in its
place, and isn’t it wonderful, and I don’t have to worry about it
anymore, that is not what a marriage is. A marriage continually
requires attention, tender loving care, all sorts of things. It’s
difficult. If you start to look at it, what we normally mean by
perfect, it doesn’t make any sense. You’re probably going to stagnate,
but if you look at it in the biblical sense of perfect, what that word
actually conveys in Greek, then mature, yes, you grow into marriage.
You ripen. It becomes mature and all the other beautiful things that
happen.
TOJ: You celebrated the beauty in clumsiness. In marriage, like many things, we try so hard to do it well or to do it right. In Acedia and Me you celebrated the clumsiness and the work of it and then wove that together with prayer and acedia. It really was beautiful.
KN: Well, thank you, because that is intimate writing.
I mean you are really writing about stuff without a mask of fiction or
anything else. You are really trying to write about your own situation,
your own marriage. Well, thanks, I am glad that it worked for you.
TOJ: I hope that a lot of people read it just beginning marriage.
KN: When you say “In sickness and in health,” boy, you
know sometimes you are really going to get called on that! And in my
case my husband was really quite healthy and robust when I married him,
but he ended up having all sorts of physical and mental problems over
the years that required both of us to do some really hard work and
reaffirm the commitment in a sense. You know when you make that
commitment, it’s serious.
In the most recent issue of 
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