My wife and I had very different beliefs when we got together. What we did was, we stopped talking about it. For many years. We just lived our lives together, and let the subject of religion and belief lay quiet. Over time, we grew together in that silence. Something grew between us, in that empty space.
Nowadays, almost by some kind of cosmic accident, our beliefs (or non-beliefs) are quite similar. In my situation, I was the Christian (or so I thought, though the writing was on the wall before I met her), and my wife was the non-believer. Perhaps our situation isn’t so accidental after all, but it still strikes me as, er, twisted kind of strangely, in a sort of whorl at the bottom of the draining sink kind of way. It’s a long story. But the point is, people can live together who believe, or think differently, about “things”. After a while I saw value in what she held dear. Silence engendered humility in each of us. It gave us room to breathe, to think, to feel, to scope out the true shape of the other person, at least in regard to belief.
What I didn’t know at first was that, what she had to give me was valuable. This was because of my arrogance. My arrogance was part of the framework that held my belief system together. She also found value in my belief, a belief neither of us now hold, but still see value in.
How we gave valuable things to each other by not talking about them is an interesting thing to think about. I am not sure how that worked. But it did. Your situation is a bit different. You may have to find another way to expose your intrinsic value to each other. I suppose it is ultimately about respect. If you can both find ways to respect each other, things will have a much better chance to work out in the end, at least as regards belief/non-belief.
I find myself thinking as I write this that, respect, like a lot of other things, grows in layers, like, say, onion skins. Or maybe it is like sedimentary layers in the earth, laying in silence, awaiting our discovery. We think we understand what respect is, but then we go deeper. Eventually, if we are lucky, we can get to a sustaining love that is blind to what we used to view as important. That respect says, both to ourselves and to each other, that our true selves are valuable. Respect is ultimately about seeing correctly. For me, going deeper into this place of respect was a journey in and of itself. I suppose the “accident” was the silence. No one told us to do that, it just happened spontaneously.
My wife and I had very different beliefs when we got together. What we did was, we stopped talking about it. For many years. We just lived our lives together, and let the subject of religion and belief lay quiet. Over time, we grew together in that silence. Something grew between us, in that empty space.
Nowadays, almost by some kind of cosmic accident, our beliefs (or non-beliefs) are quite similar. In my situation, I was the Christian (or so I thought, though the writing was on the wall before I met her), and my wife was the non-believer. Perhaps our situation isn’t so accidental after all, but it still strikes me as, er, twisted kind of strangely, in a sort of whorl at the bottom of the draining sink kind of way. It’s a long story. But the point is, people can live together who believe, or think differently, about “things”. After a while I saw value in what she held dear. Silence engendered humility in each of us. It gave us room to breathe, to think, to feel, to scope out the true shape of the other person, at least in regard to belief.
What I didn’t know at first was that, what she had to give me was valuable. This was because of my arrogance. My arrogance was part of the framework that held my belief system together. She also found value in my belief, a belief neither of us now hold, but still see value in.
How we gave valuable things to each other by not talking about them is an interesting thing to think about. I am not sure how that worked. But it did. Your situation is a bit different. You may have to find another way to expose your intrinsic value to each other. I suppose it is ultimately about respect. If you can both find ways to respect each other, things will have a much better chance to work out in the end, at least as regards belief/non-belief.
I find myself thinking as I write this that, respect, like a lot of other things, grows in layers, like, say, onion skins. Or maybe it is like sedimentary layers in the earth, laying in silence, awaiting our discovery. We think we understand what respect is, but then we go deeper. Eventually, if we are lucky, we can get to a sustaining love that is blind to what we used to view as important. That respect says, both to ourselves and to each other, that our true selves are valuable. Respect is ultimately about seeing correctly. For me, going deeper into this place of respect was a journey in and of itself. I suppose the “accident” was the silence. No one told us to do that, it just happened spontaneously.