Best Wine Saved for the Last in a Marriage - Life of the Luthers

A Quick Tongue Vs A Quick Temper

Martin Luther was the one who sparked the Protestant reformation by nailing his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.  But how many of you know about his wife, Katie, the runaway nun? She had a quick tongue and Martin had a quick temper, a combination that does not usually make for a good marriage. One biographer calls Katie a “quick-witted Saxon with a ready tongue,” which made an interesting match for Luther, an intense debater with a short fuse. No doubt, they both had an unusual marriage. Let us glean some secrets for a happy marriage from theirs. For a forty-one year old former monk and the twenty-six year old former nun, there were lots to get used to.

Runaway Monk Vs Runaway Nun

Katie grew up in a nunnery when she was only nine or ten years old. At the time of reformation led by Martin Luther, when monks and nuns were leaving their monastic houses, nine nuns were delivered at his door steps. It became Martin’s job, to either find position or husbands for them. The nuns were not trained in housekeeping. All they could do was to sing and pray. Somehow Martin fixed lives for the eight and the one left was Katie. It was not as if no one wanted her. Her personality and quick wit attracted the attention of at least some men. But none were successful. Meanwhile Martin’s parents who were happy to know that his son came out of the catholic celibacy vows, put pressure on him to marry. And Martin himself had been preaching for many years by then, that marriage was a divinely established institution and to elevate celibacy above marriage was unbiblical. With all that, Martin decided to marry Katie.

Katie's Prominence

There is nothing romantic about their early days of marriage. There were lot of issues specially with regard to managing the finances. Martin was liberal and hospitable, whereas Katie was frugal and wanted to make money out of any service she provided. She saved money and bought assets and properties. Katie was many things for Martin – a gardener, a cook, a nurse, a cattle-raiser, a bookkeeper and a brewer. According to one historian, “Katie ruled both her household and her husband, a situation which the latter accepted resignedly, since he was totally incapable of organizing the affairs of even the smallest household. She brought order into his life and not always to his satisfaction.” Martin would probably change that assessment by saying, “She managed the areas that I delegated to her.”

Life was Hectic

Katie after a day with their six children, servants and animals wanted to talk with an equal. While Martin, after preaching four times, lecturing and conversing with students at meals, wanted to drop into a chair and sink into a book. This tested their patience and they had to learn to be patient with one other. Martin had a shopping list of ailments including gout, insomnia, hemorrhoids, gall and kidney stones, dizziness and ringing in the ears. Katie patiently nursed him back to health with proper diet, herbs, poultices and massages. Kathie also had to be a remarkable woman to manage the ever-expanding Luther household. The first floor in their house had forty rooms with cells above for sleeping. Besides their six children, there were a half a dozen of Martin’s nephews and nieces. Luther also brought the four children of his friend who lost his wife.  To cope with the growing household, Katie in turn brought in some of her relatives to help her out. Besides there were tutors and student boarders, and due to Luther’s fame, guests dropped in unexpectedly from England and elsewhere. So life was not easy for the couple.

Best Wine Saved for the Last

Katie called him “Doctor’ in public conversation. Martin called her anything that came to his mind. Sometimes thinking of Eve, he called her, “my rib.” More often thinking the way she managed the household affairs, he called her, “my lord.” Katie had a flair to acquire lands like an empress. So Martin addressed her as a “rich lady.” He even wrote, “Oh, Katie, you have a husband who loves you. Let someone else be an empress.” Martin’s appreciation of marriage deepened during his twenty years of living with Katie. Comparing marriage to the miracle at Cana in John 2, he says that the best wine is saved for last. Marriage is a school for character, and both he and Katie learnt much in that school. They learnt from each other, and from their children, and from their mutual experiences. They were an arguing couple. But still they managed to enjoy a good marriage. “To have peace and love is a gift which is next to the knowledge of the Gospel,” Martin once said.

Luther's Wisdom Quotes

Before his marriage, Luther sometimes spoke of matrimony as a necessity for the flesh. Afterwards he emphasised that it was an opportunity for the spirit. He decried the fact that many men were marrying only for physical reasons, abusing their wives, and knew nothing about love. “Marriage is no joke,” he said, “it must be worked on, and prayed over…To get a wife is easy enough, but to love her with consistency is difficult…for the mere union of the flesh is not sufficient, there must be a congeniality of tastes and character. And that congeniality does not come over night. Love begins when we wish to serve each other. A husband is supposed to love his wife, who is his nearest neighbour. She should be his deepest love and dearest friend.” All of these words are evident, when he called the book of Galatians as his Katharina Van Bora (Katie’s full name). Most of us know that it was the reading and understanding of the book of Galatians which led to his spiritual rebirth and eventually the Protestant Church. Martin often loved to quote: "Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”

Luther left for eternal home before Katie. At his death bed, Luther admonished: “If it be God’s will, accept it.”Katie responded: “My dear doctor, if it is God’s will, I would rather have you with our Lord than here. Don’t worry about us. God will take care of us.” Katie died four years later to her husband. Her last words were: “I will stick to Christ as a burr to a top coat.” 

The success of any marriage, like the Luthers, depends on two people who are not afraid to grow and change.

(I have copied lines from William J. Petersen’s “Martin Luther Had a Wife” for this article.)

They Loved Each Other – The Life of the Booths

How does a marriage work when both husband and wife are public figures? What if both are strong minded and dogmatic? Catherine Booth was as famous as her general husband, William Booth.  No wonder, their marriage survived and was successful too.  No religious movement has ever been more the product of a husband and wife team than the Salvation Army. It is also said that no family has ever disseminated the gospel farther and more effectively than William and Catherine and their eight children.

In some ways, they seemed an unlikely couple. He was tall (about six-foot-one), gangling, a bit awkward sporting a black beard and usually wearing a dark frock coat. She was dark, slightly built, had lustrous brown eyes, and carried herself with obvious refinement.  Both William and Catherine were intense, opinionated, determined. Both were frequently moody and prone to depression. Did their marriage work out? It worked and both lived to see the Salvation Army which they began in the London slums which has spread to fifty-two countries. The merger of social concern and aggressive evangelism among all types of people in Salvation Army added a refreshing new dimension to Christendom.

Catherine had definite thoughts on the kind of man she wanted to marry. He would have to have religious views similar to hers. He would have to be a man of sense and character and he would have to have similar tastes. She also believed that she must be physically attracted to him. Lastly he should be a total abstainer. Besides that, she had a personal preference for a minister. William Booth met all the qualifications except for not being a total abstainer. She soon convinced him of the importance of total abstinence, and that made him her perfect match.

William felt strongly that every minister’s wife should play the piano. So Catherine tried to learn the skill before she would be married to him. But that was not easy, because she lacked any musical sense. One day with bitter tears she said to herself, “William, I do this for you. Measure my love for you by this standard.” But what came easy for Catherine was writing sermons for him.

Catherine developed four rules for their married life: 1) Never to have any secrets between them 2) Never to have two purses 3) Talk out differences of opinion to secure harmony and not to try to pretend that differences don’t exist 4) Never to argue in front of children. The fact that two of the four had to do with differences of opinion underlines the fact they had some.

One area where they initially differed regarded women.  Catherine won the argument. Interestingly it was William who prodded her into preaching, and a decade later she was more in demand as a preacher than he was. When a nearby minister attacked women’s right to preach, Catherine responded with a thirty-two page rebuttal. To her mother she wrote: “Would you believe that a congregation half composed of ladies could sit and hear such self-depreciatory rubbish?”  She could never understand why reports on sermons by women preachers seemed to concentrate more on fashion than on content. As a female preacher, her delivery was calm, precise and clear without the least approach to formality or tediousness.

Catherine wanted to accompany her husband everywhere, for his sake as well as hers, but her health could not take it. When the Booths were nearly sixty and the Salvation Army had become international with their children spreading the message into distant lands, it was then Catherine discovered a cancerous growth on her breast. When she was given eighteen months to live, she told her husband that her first thought was that she would not be there to nurse William, when he comes to his last hour.  It was a crushing blow for William. He writes that for the first time, he had a sorrow that he could not cast on HIM. He felt that life became a burden and it was too heavy for him to bear. Later he writes: “To stand by the side of those you love and watch the ebbing tide of life, while the stabs of pain make the eyes flash fire and every nerve quivers, forcing cries of suffering from the courageous soul – is an experience of sorrow words can but poorly describe.”

Biographers state that both William and Catherine came from parents who had problem marriages. One would not expect the love and commitment that was evidenced by the Booths.  But they needed each other. At times they admonished each other. At other times they propped each other. The fact of the matter is, they loved each other.

"Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned." (Song of Solomon 8:7)

(I have copied lines from William J. Petersen’s “Martin Luther Had a Wife” for this article.)

For Better, For Worse - William and Dorothy Carey's Marriage

William Carey was the pioneer among missionary pioneers and Bible translator par excellence.  But his wife Dorothy had emotional problems. In going through this brief write-up on the Careys, we should end up finding clues that will help preserve the mental health of our own marriages.    

The marriage of William and Dorothy was not exactly idyllic. For more than forty years, William pioneered and plodded as a missionary in India. Dorothy lasted fourteen years reluctantly and pitifully. The story of William Carey, the humble shoe maker who became a brilliant missionary linguist shows how, God plucked an unlikely candidate to be the leader of a multitude. But what about poor Dorothy?

Nothing is known of the courtship of the two. But when they married, Carey was nineteen, Dorothy was twenty five. In their small poverty stricken home, where they started their lives, when William was not working on shoes or gardening, he was reading or studying Greek or preaching. Dorothy was an illiterate. It is said that at the time of her marriage to William, she signed the church’s register with a “large, wobbly cross”.

Year two of the marriage was traumatic for the couple, with the death of their daughter Ann. A high fever left William bald at the age of twenty-one. The daughter’s death left Dorothy despondent and fearful. While William bought a wig to cover his bald, Dorothy found nothing to cover her emotional hurts. William got the opportunity to pastor a church in England. In his spare time, he learnt foreign languages – Greek, Latin, French, Dutch and Italian – all of which were relatively easy for him, while Dorothy was struggling with her alphabets in English.

With four children in the Carey household, it is said that William was apparently concerned about disciplining his own mind and was not concerned if his children were undisciplined in behaviour. Dorothy possibly felt neglected, even abandoned by her husband. He seemed always to have important things to do. William’s world was growing, but Dorothy’s was shrinking.  From the very beginning, even though William Carey was failing as a husband,  he was not going to quit, in his burden for a missionary outreach to India.

Poor Dorothy was not ready for her journey to India. She had plenty to fear in such a venture. The couple had now lost one more child, with three boys left. When she first refused to go with him to India, many were shocked. It was accepted that a wife would blindly follow her husband, wherever he would lead him. However after many days of persuasion, Dorothy reluctantly agreed to the decision that her sister Kitty would accompany the family to India.

Four months aboard in ship with three boys and a new born baby would pose a challenge for any mother. Dorothy must have sensed that she would probably never see England and her loved ones again. Not sharing her husband’s missionary commitment, she felt as if she were sailing toward a slow death. Dorothy’s depression deepened into neurosis when her sister Kitty left her after marrying an English man in India.

The Careys had made six moves in their first nine months on the mission field. In the sixth place not long before they settled, Peter, their five year old died of dysentery. William, himself who was stricken with malaria then, had to dig the grave of his own child, since no one opted to help. Peter was the third child that the Careys had lost. But for Dorothy, it was a loss of everything in her life. From then on, William speaks of his wife as his, “domestic affliction”. After this, in one of his letters, Carey wrote regarding the qualifications for future missionaries. One thing was that, “it is absolutely necessary for the wives of missionaries to be as hearty in the work as their husbands.” Previously, it had not dawned on William that this was so important.

While the Careys finally arrived at their new mission quarters in Serampore, Calcutta, Dorothy was so deranged, that she was incapable of sharing in any of the domestic responsibilities. Hannah Marshman, another coworker in the missionary team took care of the Carey boys. Hannah gets credit for disciplining the boys, because William Carey was from the beginning unsuccessful in disciplining his own children. Dorothy at this stage was turning violent and had to be confined in a separate room. She finally passed away at the age of fifty-one. In her fourteen years in India, she was deranged for nearly twelve years.

Six months after Dorothy died, William remarried. To Carey, Charlotte his second wife for another thirteen years, was everything a missionary wife should be. The joys of his second marriage aroused his desire to marry a third time after Charlotte passed away. It was a happy marriage again, ending with his own death eleven year later.

William Carey was a plodder in every sense. What caused Dorothy’s mental illness? Hereditary problem? Insecure living conditions? William seems to have easy-going and indecisive in his dealings with his own family. Probably, he could not provide the security and stability that Dorothy needed. Also Dorothy could not understand the missionary commitment and sacrifice, a couple has to have and face as a family  in a mission filed.

After writing on the Careys, I feel, couples today, need to remember often the vow we gave on our marriage day in the presence of God, as often as possible and take attempts to fulfil it:  "I ___ take you, ___, to be my (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, for as long as we both shall live." In both prosperous and adverse situations, we need to choose to be united in our married lives, holding on to His grace. 

(I have copied lines from William J. Petersen’s “Martin Luther Had a Wife” for this article.)