Friend visits the Common Laws

I went avisiting again last nite. I'm shocked at myself.
Two visits out, in just one week's time. It will end my
neo-monasticism of the eremitic kind. The hermit is
not sufficiently hermitted, tho I maintain my member-
ship link with Raven's Bread, the loosely associated
hermits of Christian background in North America.
But this week, had I become a gad-about town?, one
asks oneself sheepishly and curious about change.

It was after I had made and devoured my supper,
along with the appropriate cholesterol pills, of course.
Having phoned the couple I had in mind before supper,
I soon forgot my plain to get an invitation to their home
this Friday nite. So it was after alimentary self-service
that I got a return call, and an invite to spend the
evening with them. She was home from Ka Ra Te, where
she holds a Belt of some distinguished colour or other.
And while she fnished her soup, we talked on and on.

I exposited my Reformational theory of the need to
retain the traditional legal definition of marriage,
aware in the back of my mind that my dear friend had
had no legal recognition of her permanent and exclusive
relationship with her man. This was her choice, altho
they had mentioned it off-handedly a few times over
the many years of happy and unhappy union, now much
more consistently on the flourishing side for sure. And
never more dissatisfied than most I've known who've
entered into civil certification and fortified themselves
with legalities, some having fogotten the meaning of the
word that had aged into just a sociological-status term.

My friends are what the law recognizes as "common law."
They have a bit of an anarachist stance, in that they don't
recognize the state's provisions and requirements that
accrue upon civilly-recognized marriage (traditional legal
definition or no). They simply don't partake of the state's
code-books of legislation and regulation. To its credit,
however, the Canadian state is ready, willing and able to
make sure no injustice is done either party, should they
have a parting of the ways. As to that hypothetical, I don't
think so. They are together, and as far as the relationship
is concerned, but without formal vowing of permanence
and exclusivity, they are married de facto. I'd say
God sees them and their relationship, and loves them for
who they are and what their relationship has become -
thru journey and struggle. And also for their work, the
vocations by which each has contributed to culture and the
societal whole.

So, my view of marriage traditional, starts with God its
Creator and doesn't necessaily ever get around to Church
or State. So that's before I find my own take on my friends'
self-awareness as to their relationship before government,
her own status of being "unmarried", and his. Traditional
without lingering to endorse or even recognize tradition.

And soon enuff he arrived from work at the cottage, covered
in muddy clothes which he changed and sat down to his own
supper with us still at the table, and new streams of lively
conversation arising, ebbing, flowing and crisscrossing,
while fragments of the old conversation continued interlaced
into the widened confluence of interminlgling thawts, and
all too soon it was time to call it a nite and to call a cab.