Ready for Love, How about Marriage?

By Anthony T. Henry

Ready for Love, How about Marriage? takes the reader down a cultural, religious, and sometimes political path in the discourse of love and marriage. It explores psychological concepts of love and establishes the characteristics that should be present in love that leads to marriage.

And what if your quality of love is ready for marriage? You will discover the importance of a personal mission statement and how it contributes to developing family goals and values. The book helps the reader to manage family conflict, crisis, and wealth. It delves into religion and spirituality and intimacy and sex and takes a look at parenting. Whether you are planning marriage or already married, there is a read for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685705107

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Ready for Love, How about Marriage?

Anthony T. Henry

ISBN 978-1-68570-509-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68570-510-7 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Anthony T. Henry

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

The Horse and the Carriage

Chapter 2

The Love Revolution

Chapter 3

Ready for Love?

Chapter 4

How about Marriage

Chapter 5

The Personal and Family Mission Statements

Chapter 6

Roles and Responsibilities

Chapter 7

Religion and Spirituality

Chapter 8

Intimacy and Sex

Chapter 9

Values That Build Relationships

Chapter 10

Managing Conflicts

Chapter 11

Crisis Management

Chapter 12

Wealth Management

Chapter 13

Parenting

About the Author

For as long as I have known Anthony Henry—he's known me longer than I know myself—he has loved teaching through storytelling and using provocative questions to stimulate reflection. He's been my mentor, (surrogate) father and friend for over 35 years. Family is a word that radiates in conversation with him. He's performed the marriage ceremonies for members of my family and friends; 'til death do them part and has been an unapologetic advocate for God's familial design. Seeing Anthony's labor of love for family and marriage come to fruition in this text is astounding. I believe that his genuine intention is to share with others every good thing God-breathed about the institution of family and to prompt careful contemplation ahead of saying forever, I do.

Understanding the reverence bestowed on and expected within marriage is to expose ourselves, as couples, to critical engagement with God's design for marital relationships and our own moral persuasions. Whether that means framing a vision statement or acronym for the marriage; having forgiveness and reconciliation at the forefront of every conflict; or, accepting a loss to ensure you both win as a couple, Anthony's goal is simple—that we love each other as Christ loved the church. He has counselled many to ensure they share similar visions, persuasions, and reflections in marriage. Anthony has also denied some the opportunity to have him preside over their nuptials, given the responsibility he carries for ensuring the preservation of marriages in the body of Christ. He is, therefore, best poised to share lessons learned, practical examples of marital negotiations, and encouragement to anyone who is ready for or currently experiencing love and marriage.

It was not surprising, when I made the decision to get married, that Anthony was the only counsellor that came to mind with reference to pre-marital counselling. My husband and I wanted something fireproof and if any God-inspired marriage blacksmith existed, it was Anthony Henry. It is interesting and, to be honest, sometimes annoying that with every disagreement in my marriage, my reflections often engage with a practical lesson from our sessions with Anthony, hinged on a Christian principle. I am thrilled to encourage readers to set apart time to engage, reflect and act on what is contained within this book.

—Dr Sasha Sutherland

Foreword

Growing up in a church where young people were expected to maintain a certain level of decorum and follow the rules of the elders without question was the order of the day. However, when a disrupter like Anthony Henry entered the midst, asking questions and challenging the status quo, things started to shift. Young people began to engage in critical thinking, develop aspirational goals, and acquire intellectual and spiritual acumen. Anthony Henry, as a teenager, was very precocious. He had a deep desire for learning and questioned everything in his quest for knowledge. That he would attend the West Indies School of Theology was no surprise as he was someone, I considered to be a visionary, a global thinker. One who sees beyond the obvious, beyond what's in plain sight, and looks at the big picture.

Anthony met and married his late wife, Magna, who was the most beautiful, gracious, gentlewoman. She did not come from royalty or nobility but her presence and decorum exuded royalty. I believe that her calm gentleness balanced Anthony's fiery boldness. Their two children Trevor and Kathleen are great representations of their parents' personalities. Anthony was blessed with another opportunity for love when he met and married his beautiful wife of twenty-one years, Sheryl, to continue his family legacy.

April 20th, 1969 is a date that binds Anthony and me together. It is the day that we were both baptized at the Faith Tabernacle Church in St. James, Trinidad. Over the years our paths have taken different routes. Anthony served at his church as a pre-marital counselor and teacher, and at the U.S. Mission in Trinidad as a Financial Specialist. My path led to education. I retired from Arizona State University after 21 years as a professor. For the past 15 years, I have been serving as Director of Children's Ministries at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Covid-19 caused our paths to cross again. Anthony, Dr. Sasha Sutherland, and I came together to host a Zoom broadcast Real Talk Family Life. The program promotes Biblical principles and values for today's family.

Anthony's book, Ready for Love, how about Marriage is a thought-provoking secular and Biblical historical journey of love, its foundation for marriage and its importance as the glue that maintains family emotional and spiritual relationships. This book is a must-read for those who are beginning to experience the joy of love and are contemplating marriage. It offers tools for strengthening the family and building a family legacy.

—Dr. Patricia Neff

Chapter 1

The Horse and the Carriage

For those who remember the melodies of the 1950s and early 1960s, you will recall the many songs that glorified love and marriage during that era—pieces like Chapel of Love by the Dixie Cups, Dean Martin's Memories Are Made of This, You Send Me by Sam Coke, and the long list of others. The one, in my opinion, that best measured the social temperature on this theme was Frank Sinatra's Love and Marriage.

Love and marriage, love and marriage,

Go together like a horse and carriage.

This I tell ya, brother, you can't have one without the other.

Love and marriage, love and marriage,

It's an institute you can't disparage.

Ask the local gentry and they will say it's elementary.¹

The horse and carriage gave way to the motor car, and very soon, the current models will become obsolete, and the self-driven car (a computer with four wheels) will take the stage. The concept of love and marriage being hitched together as a horse and carriage is no longer the accepted norm. Those days no longer exist in Western civilization. The censored movies and the songs gave the impression that every young man who fell in love rehearsed in his mind a thousand times how he will bend his knees before his lover and say, Will you marry me?

A careful examination of the horse and carriage analogy to love and marriage in the 1960s will reveal several fallacies to the concept. During the mid-1960s, the institution of marriage in the Americas was already denigrated from what it was, as philosophized by the Grecian scholars and the early teachers of the Christian faith. The Western social system that governed the convention of marriage prior the mid-1960s had at its core that the God of the Bible was the Creator of that system. This principle was accentuated when the United States of America changed its national pledge in 1954 to incorporate the words under God.

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.²

Christians generally believe marriage to be the first legal action in the human family, enacted and performed by God in the garden of Eden. Few dared to challenge this concept in the Western world before the mid-1960s lest they encountered the fierce warriors of God's army—legislators and church leaders. A closer look at the upholders of this system, which was highly regarded as the bedrock of the society, will bring us face-to-face with men who were flawed to the core. These men had created a culture that was in no way different to the social structure that was propped up by the Jewish religious leaders when the Galilean prophet, Jesus, appeared on the scene. His words best described the socioreligious fabric of his day and the period prior to the mid-1960s in the Western world.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill, and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.³

Two factors were central to Western families of the 1960s that undermined the concept that love and marriage were likened to the horse and carriage.

Interracial marriage

Gender inequality

We shall examine these two aspects of marriage that smeared the institution even when Mr. Sinatra suggested that it could not be disparaged.

Interracial Marriage

During the 1960s, the US Congress (the legislative arm of government) was composed of approximately 75 percent Protestant Christians and 20 percent Roman Catholics. The religion of these lawmakers significantly influenced the marriage laws. Yet marriage and race relations not only were discriminatory against non-white Americans but also were antithetical to the very teachings of the Christian scriptures. For example, the Jim Crow (a derogatory term for black people) laws that bore testimony to the social and religious culture of the day supported racial segregation in the United States up to the mid-1960s.

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period. The laws were enforced until 1965.⁴

The minister would read or recite in every Christian marriage ceremony, Marriage is a union between a man and a woman and is the first institution ordained by God. And, of course, the reference would be made to the Genesis story of creation, how God was the sole witness and priest when he gave Eve to Adam. For almost four hundred years (from the slave trade to the 1960s), the Western Christian church would include the teachings of the second book of Genesis—my bible name for the Jim Crow laws—to solemnize and legalize marriage. In this book, we read that marriage could only be solemnized between individuals of the same race. Any sexual relationship between mixed-race couples was considered fornication or adultery. Zeno Tharp in his Ministers' Guide for Special Occasion provides the following advice to Christian ministers who solemnized marriages:

A minister should be cautious about run-away couples, divorced couples, and couples who are ill-matched because of age, race, color, etc. also couples who are intoxicated or insincere.⁵

Several reasons can be advanced why a couple may be ill-matched. Religion can be a factor—for example, a Christian and a Moslem who are uncompromising with their faith.

Another reason can be psychological. Every leading psychologist attest to the idea that a father or mother who becomes sexually involved with a child will likely damage the psyche of that child. One must ask, How do varying skin tones make a couple ill-matched? Will their offspring suffer from some inherent psychological factor? Before you think of an answer to these questions, call to memory a man named Barack Obama Sr. and a woman name Ann Dunham. They knew that color had nothing to do with the horse and carriage. Just as the horse (love) is colorless, so should be the carriage (marriage).

The church leaders of the 1960s did not only consider interracial marriage as ill-matched, but also many of them believed that it was sinful. For some, the act was likened to the sin of bestiality. Yet, amid this social aggression to preserve the sanctity of marriage in the Arian race, a hybrid human species was rapidly emerging in the Western society. The character Sarah Jane, from the movie the Imitation of Life, brought to our attention the perfect model of this hybrid race. She possessed the face of a human and seemingly the soul and emotions of an ape and the skin color of her white father but inwardly yearned to escape the blackness her mother.

Who was responsible for the manipulation of the chromosomes in the human body that created this new color in the West? The blame rests squarely at the feet of those white legislators and church leaders who insisted that those of nonwhite skin tones were inferior in nature. They touted the Genesis passage in which Noah cursed his youngest son and committed his descendants to a life of servitude to justify slavery of the black man. Mind you, none of those who advanced this argument ever stopped to consider that God had blessed the sons of Noah after the flood, and Ham only fell out of favor with his father because he (Noah) had allowed wine to control his judgment. If anyone should have been cursed that day, it should have been Noah, for not being a better example to his sons.

But let the argument of the religious bigots of the mid-1960s stand for now. The black man was enslaved as Noah had predicted. The Christian pulpit had found a way to justify slavery. Let us assume that these black people did not have the ability to experience the divine virtues such as honor, kindness, and love; then arguably, there is no need for the higher calling of marriage. To the white legislator and church leader, black people bore the same value of the domesticated animals of the field. Although scholars have debunked this concept over the years, the idea remains in the consciousness of many up to this day. Tom Jacobs, a senior staff writer who specializes in social science, culture, and learning, wrote the following in an article entitled Study Confirms an Unconscious Linking of Blacks with Apes for the Pacific Standard:

Two years ago, just after presidential candidate Barack Obama made his famous speech on race, we reported on disturbing evidence that white Americans unconsciously associate African Americans with apes. Newly published research suggests that connection remains stubbornly lodged in our psyches.⁶

Let me return to the idea of this emerging new hybrid race in the West. Our religious pundits on the one hand were adamant that Leviticus 20:15–16 is the law of God.

If a man has sex with an animal, he must be put to death, and the animal must be killed. If a woman presents herself to a male animal to have intercourse with it, she and the animal must both be put to death. You must kill both, for they are guilty of a capital offense.

Yet, on the other hand, white males, church leaders, legislators, and others had no problem in leaving their wives' beds and journeying to the camps of the apes for sexual gratification. Yes, white men were responsible for the abuse of black women. That statement could not be said in the reverse. If it did, the verdict would always be rape. It was the only way a white woman could became pregnant for a black man whether the relationship was consensual or not. A black man had to be out of his mind (some of them were) to engage in a sexual relationship with a white woman since the result was death by decapitation. This was the penalty that the Church of Latter-Day Saints inflicted on their members who erred in this regard.

This was not pre-World War United States. Laws that were designed to regulate marriage between the races existed until the turn of the twenty-first century. The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documented the story of the Loving family whose victory over a legal system brought an end to anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. Here is the story.

On July 11, 1958, newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving were asleep in bed when three armed police officers burst into the room.