It's spring. Love is in the air. Wedding season is about to dawn upon us. I highly recommend my favorite marriage guru, Mike Mason. (Of course, I've yet to corroborate his observations and insights by my own experience. :) )

Excerpts from Mike Mason's The Mystery of Marriage:

"A marriage, or marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one's living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going - to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door - the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic: but also, let's face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience."

"What is this alien, unknowable place at the very heart of the one we love? Probably it is the place of our familiarity with God. For one of the most profound ways in which the Lord touches us, and teaches us about Himself and His Own essential otherness, is through the very limits He has placed upon our relationships with one another. It is an enormous source of human frustration that our need for intimacy far outstrips its capacity to be met in other people. Primarily what keeps us separate is our sin, but there is also another factor, which is that in each one of us the holiest and neediest and most sensitive place of all has been made and is reserved for God alone, so that ony He can enter there. No one else can love us as He does, and no one can be the sort of Friend to us that He is."

"It is no small thing to open our hearts and our arms and allow another to enter there, to grant to another person the same worth, the same consequence, the same existential gravity that we take for granted in ourselves. The fact is that our natural tendency is to treat people as if they were not "others" at all, but merely aspects of ourselves . . . . . . And so we walk around with our heads in the clouds, pass people on the street as if they were telephone poles, look them straight in the eyes and hardly see them, and engage in conversations that are really only conversations with ourselves. Too often others are but the punctuation marks in the dry and windy monologues of our own self-centered existence."

"For people are the consciousness of God in the world, the closest thing to Him in the physical realm, and a more vivid reminder than anything else in creation of His existence, His mystery, and His creative power. . . The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity in the world is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset. . . . . . Other people, let's face it, confront us directly with the realite of love or hate that is in our hearts, in a way that all the beautiful sunsets in the world cannot do."