By DONALD DeMARCO
The adverb “just” is the most deadening word in the English language. This sorry fact was brought to my attention yet again during a conversation I had with an engaging, though not engaged, couple. By way of summarizing what they had told me, I asked, hoping I was not being impertinent, “Since you love each other, are committed to each other, and are willing to accept the responsibilities of parenthood if a child comes into the picture, why don’t you two get married?”
Their response was brief and to the point: “Because marriage is just a piece of paper.”
Had they gained an insight that had eluded untold millions of couples throughout history? Their reduction of marriage to a piece of paper was not new. I had heard it before, and it still rang hollow. I was not in a disputatious mood that evening, but their facile rejection of marriage (alias holy matrimony) continued to swirl around in my brain.
Even that piece of paper is not just a piece of paper. It has meaning and even legal significance. It testifies that a particular couple is, indeed, married. If my cynical friends found a ten-dollar bill, they surely would not regard it as “just a piece of paper.” To many, an unused postage stamp is worth no more than its face value. To a philatelist, however, a particularly rare stamp, even one that is canceled, is exceedingly valuable and can command well over a million dollars at auction.
Furthermore, when my friends looked into each other’s eyes, they saw not just another partner but someone very special, someone they could love and with whom they could dedicate their lives. They had a clear sense that a person is not just a body or just an individual. Why, then, denigrate marriage? There is no human relationship which is its equal in stability, durability, and fertility. Why relegate marriage to a piece of paper when they know better than to compare their relationship with trains passing in the night? Perhaps, as many couples fear, that marriage is a trap from which they can never escape.
When we employ the adverb “just,” we flatten things out. But in so doing, we lose sight of its fundamental meaning and beauty. This process of flattening things has become a pandemic. Love is just a surge of transitory emotions. Life is just a series of meaningless events. The spoken word is just the fluttering of air. The unspoken word is just a sign that is open to interpretation. Truth is just someone’s opinion. Heaven is just a dream. God is just a hypothesis. The hit song from the movie Casablanca tells us that “a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.”
Auguste Rodin, who gave the kiss an immortal form in his famous marble sculpture, could not disagree more vehemently. A kiss can enrapture, bring souls together, and capture an unforgettable moment. A kiss is not just a kiss. If it is truly a kiss, it is also a pledge.
Love has a way of improving one’s appreciation, even for ordinary experiences. Consider the first stanza from a “golden oldie”: “It was just a neighborhood dance, that’s all that it was, but oh, what it seemed to be. It was like a masquerade ball, with costumes and all, ’cause you were at the dance with me.” Love does not take us away from reality, but to a higher plane.
Nothing is just what it seems to be at first glance. Albert Einstein, hardly a romanticist, averred that there are two kinds of people, those who see everything as a miracle and those who see nothing as a miracle. When we walk with Shakespeare through the Forest of Arden, we find “tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything” (As You Like It, Act III, Scene 1). C.S. Lewis spoke of “patches of Godlight in the woods of our experience.”
The pseudo-philosophy of deconstruction has had an important role in reducing things to just entities that are, to use one of their pet words, “undecidable.” The antithesis of deconstruction is Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy that finds personal meaning even in concentration camps. Without meaning, when the tedium is the message, life becomes unbearable. Milan Kundera’s existential novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, focuses on how, under Communist oppression, the citizens of Czechoslovakia struggle to find a higher meaning to life than immersing themselves in pleasure. Paul Tillich has remarked that the greatest threat to people in the modern world is the sense of emptiness that leads to utter meaninglessness.
St. Joseph was, as Scripture informs us, a “just man.” But he was not just a man. He sensed the divinity in his spouse and in his foster child, and the exalted role that God has given him. Each sentence in the Gospel, in fact, is telling us that everything points to the divine.
A basic tenet of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching is that the natural law participates in the eternal law. The fuller meaning in nature is found above nature which is the doorway to the eternal. He states that everything has a “certain hidden sanctity” or a “sacred secret” (Summa Theologiae, III, 60, 1).
We will escape from boredom if we cultivate the practice of seeing more than meets the eye and hearing more than greets the ear. Life becomes magical when we recognize that everything is not just what it is, but more than it is. And that “more” has a sacramental quality.
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