Why Singleness? Why Marriage?
On Monday night I skipped a guitar class to go and hear the lecture at the Centre for Christian Living by Andrew Cameron on Why Singleness? Why Marriage? It possibly wasn’t the best thing to do, because I realised I am reasonably familiar with Andrew’s views, through the sharing of them by his friends, one of whom wrote this article on singleness (and I'm completely unfamiliar with 12-bar blues, which we did last week in guitar class), but they are worth hearing and it was a good lecture.
I took the plunge asked a question at the end, which didn’t come out quite right as a question, but Andrew himself came and spoke to me for a good while afterwards, so that was kind of him. Andrew’s wife (I'm not entirely sure what her name is, otherwise I'd use it) actually followed up my question by saying “Andrew you’ve said before that we don’t choose marriage, we only consent to it” (which I think comes from Christopher Ash?) revealing that she was picking up on my wavelength. Interesting. You’ll be able to listen to the lecture at some point here I assume (and here's hoping they didn't record the questions, because I might have embarrassed myself for the cause) and there are some articles of interest here (in particular we were pointed to this article on family).
During the evening Andrew, when speaking on marriage, quoted Stanley Hauerwas as saying “We always marry the wrong person”, which is not unlike this recent tweet from Alain de Botton “Back-to-front modern assumption: we think it's easy to love, just hard to find the 'right one'.”
Anyway, this is the post that wasn't, because I haven't shared much about the lecture, or what my question was - I've gone all blog coy, and don't know what it is I was trying to say anymore. Next post.