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Column by John Jalsevac

February 18, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One week before I was to be married I stood on a train platform in Washington D.C., basking in the balmy glow of the early-May morning. I was returning from an award ceremony with a $2,000 check burning a hole in my pocket, the fruits of a win in a collegiate essay writing contest. My thoughts were wandering pleasantly to the various ways in which that sum could be used to spruce up what promised to be an otherwise modest honeymoon, when a friendly looking chap asked me the time, and then struck up a conversation.

Our exchange followed the predictable path of pleasantries, and in due time I mentioned that I was about to be married. At that point the man paused, looked off into the distance and mused, “Yes, I’ve done that a couple times.” And then he laughed heartily to (or perhaps at) himself, and said “good luck,” in the much the same way I suppose the hangman does to his victim – as in, “It’s nothing personal. I hope that we’ll both meet again, in pleasanter circumstances, on the Other Side”: as if there was no doubt but that we would both end up on the other side – in this case, in divorce and disillusionment.

It’s the sort of thing I got all the time before I took the vows. “A young fellow like you, getting married? Why? Hold off a few years. Enjoy your youth. Wait until you’re established and can afford to get divorced. Then think about getting married. Ha ha!” Or, in the words of Lewis Grizzard, “I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.”

It’s the sort of stuff that makes you laugh, and then cry, all in one go. But with over half of all marriages ending in divorce, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many feel this way.

Of course, we still talk a lot about love and marriage these days, but nobody seems to believe a word of it: for many marriage is more of a hobby than a vocation, something that you pick up when the mood hits you, and put down when the mood passes. Its success or failure doesn’t particularly matter in the long run, since it’s just something you were just tinkering with in the first place, like the piano, or model airplanes.

But then we hear about someone like Carlos Abarca, whose story stirs up in our minds a forgotten memory of something more, of a love that does not wither in the unpredictable, gusting winds of our moods or of unexpected changes in external circumstances, a love that is permanently safeguarded by the sturdy walls of the fiercest and most irrevocable of vows.

Carlos Abarca, in case you have not heard, is a Chilean man whose wife has been in a coma for 14 years. His rather simple and unobtrusive story has captured headlines for one very good reason: he has been faithful to his wife. He has visited her on a daily basis throughout those 14 years, and now that he has retired from the Chilean police force, he visits her three times a day. And he is neither angry, nor resentful, nor ready to give up. On the contrary.

“My affection will always be focused on her, I have never doubted it,” he told the Chilean daily El Mercurio, which broke the story.  “I don’t seek for more from life than caring for her.  There is nothing more to do.” The affection he has for his wife, says Abarca, is “stronger than ever.  I want to protect her, care for her, make sure she is well, that she lacks nothing.”

This is the sort of story that, according to the standards of the age (for which we should all have no patience), is absurd. A decade and a half spent fawning over a comatose vegetable? Move on. Get another woman. Enjoy yourself. Don’t waste your life. Be groovy, man. She would want you to. It is the same set of standards that led to the killing of Terri Schiavo by a husband that was already shacking up with another woman. Indeed, many news reports are naturally comparing the two cases.

We are astonished at Abarca’s single-minded devotion to his wife, a devotion that, by his own testimony, is not only unabated by the long years of unreciprocated daily sacrifice, but has actually increased. And yet we ought not to forget that Abarca is doing nothing except what he promised to do. He is doing nothing beyond what he said he would do, when he stood with his wife at the altar however many years ago, and vowed to love her until death.

Carlos Abarca is merely keeping his word.

I find Abarca’s choice of words revealing. He said, “My affection will always be focused on her, I have never doubted it.” Do you see what he is saying here? He is saying that he believes in himself in the only way that really matters. He says he has never doubted that his affection will always be reserved for his wife. He believes, in short, that when he makes a vow, he will, in fact, keep it.

How many of us can say that? Most of us wouldn’t give ourselves so much credit. Chesterton once described this distinctly modern problem, observing: “The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind.”

These days, whenever we make a vow, we seem to make it in a slanted sort of way, with abundant caveats. “I will love this woman (man) till death do us part…unless it gets too difficult, or unless the mood passes, or unless another, more sumptuous specimen of the female (male) sex comes along.” But a vow made in this fashion is not a vow at all. It is a farce.

In the modern world we call this attitude “freedom,” or, in the case of relationships, “free love,” which is as stupid a contradiction of terms as there ever was. “As if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free,” says Chesterton. “It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

It is at in such moments, when we encounter great men like Abarca, who have made a vow and remained unmoved, even when to keep the vow became seemingly impossible; who have remained faithful, even when all the hope for a lifetime of happiness with which the vow was made has been dashed by an unforeseen tragedy; it is at such moments that we know we have caught a glimpse of true freedom. Abarca is one of the great men, who has understood that he is free enough to give his freedom away, to bind himself irrevocably to some cause or ideal or person. And that, of course, is the only freedom worth having.