I once heard a speech at a wedding where the person compared marriage to a public washroom. Those on the outside can’t wait to get in, and those on the inside can’t wait to get out.
Or, there is a sign that said the definition of a bachelor is a selfish man who has swindled a good woman out of a divorce settlement.
My English professor’s axiom was: Marry in haste; repent at leisure.
And, my father’s favourite: Love is blind but marriage is a real eye opener.
Needless to say, there are many negative things said around marriage but there are also many holy and blessed things to say about marriage.
Today, I continue my series on the Sacraments, speaking about Marriage. Over the last two weeks, we covered Baptism and Anointing of the Sick. Once again, we need grace to be saved, meaning to go to heaven and the ordinary way to get grace is through the Sacraments. It is in the vocational sacraments – Marriage, Priesthood and Religious Life – where we can really see how necessary grace is. It was interesting for me as I was preparing this series; I was wondering what Sunday I could put Marriage in. There were readings in the seven week period that easily fit the Eucharist, Baptism, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick and Priesthood, but I struggled to find a place for Marriage and Confession until I saw this week and I thought the readings really fit well with marriage. In the First Reading, we hear the prophet going to rebels. This is marriage in our society for sure. The people have rejected God’s plan for marriage in most situations and they expect that it will work out. They won’t turn and ask the Lord to be part of their marriage; they know better; “Stay out of our bedrooms, God. You can pick up the pieces.” The Second Reading is about St Paul’s thorn in the flesh to keep him from being too elated and the Lord saying to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” Marriage is to help us be perfected in our weakness and a good marriage will show you that you can’t do this on human strength; only by the grace of God can you thrive in marriage. And then the Gospel is also so fitting. A prophet is not accepted in their own town. Marriage is a prophetic vocation and a vocation of love. How many children reject the prophetic way their parents have lived their lives in marriage to be shacked up instead of really committing to one another? The prophet is rejected and it could be our fault or, like in Jesus’ case, it is not our fault. Many people grow up and think there is nothing super natural about marriage as the people in Jesus’ time thought about Him. Yet, there is something very supernatural about marriage. Its purpose is to make saints and to be an image of the love of the Trinity here on earth.
As a priest, I don’t think I have ever attended anything as joyful and as epically heroic as a wedding, besides perhaps an ordination. People are just so happy. You can feel the joy at a wedding; it oozes out, smothering the most cynical. Why is this? Because two people are proposing to do something wonderful, that is to lay down their lives for each other. They are like heroic soldiers heading out to battle. The odds are against them but they know the matter is the life or death of their country and their families and people stand by in awe of their generous sacrifice. You might think I have a very high thought about marriage but I don’t. Marriage is a vocation of this heroic proportion. If the marriage goes well, they are saving society. As goes the family, so goes the world. Marriage is an image of the Trinity. So what goes wrong in marriage? I think what goes wrong in marriage is we make it too human. People are scared of marriage because they wonder if their human strength will hold out. Many think the best you can do is tolerate each other for a long time. But that is not God’s plan. God says you can love one another and that you can and should strive in marriage and be more in love fifty years later. Have you ever seen a couple renew their vows? There is something epic about that as well. I remember at the retreat that the Society of St Benedict gave us before Corpus Christi, many of the couples renewed their vows. It was beautiful to see. It was refreshing, actually.
So what happens in the mean time? Well, couples forget they are doing something amazing, something epic. They forget they are trying to become saints and forget that their spouse is there to help them. They weren’t told that love is hard. They didn’t think that marriage was there to help us kill the old man. One famous priest said, “Two of us entered into the seminary and I threw the other out the window.” He was not meaning that he killed another seminarian, but that he threw his old self out and put on the new man in Christ. As soon as we forget that our spouse is there to help us grow, to challenge our selfish and sinful habits, then marriage becomes very hard and challenging.
It is very true that you should not marry a person in hopes that you can change them. You must truly love them as they are, for who they are. Nevertheless, people who enter into marriage must desire to become the best versions of themselves and their marriage is meant to show them the ways they can improve. God and the Church give strong guidelines when it comes to marriage because much is at stake – the world, heaven, everything is at stake when marriage fails. Many of the Church’s, “rules,” so to speak, are around the sexual nature of marriage. There is a good reason for this because marital intimacy is your wedding vows in the flesh. Let me say this again, marital intimacy is your wedding vows in the flesh. This means that what you say in the Church before God can and should be expressed in the flesh, in the marital embrace. We do not let people make up their own vows because there is only one way to make marriage work and that is a promise to love like God. In the very same way, if you try to take physical intimacy outside of the context that God has created it for, you have what we have in the world today. Just as marriage vows that don’t express the faithful, free, fruitful and full love of God, you have sexual intimacy that does not express the love of God and it become hurtful and destructive. If the wedding vows were: “I sort of promise to be faithful to you except if someone better comes along. I will give myself totally to you and to the other people I see when I watch pornography or see in my soaps. I will be fruitful when it is convenient to me and if doesn’t affect my selfish lifestyle. Money will be first in our lives and we will put everything after that,” then everyone would say, “That is not right. You can’t promise that. You aren’t promising anything except to be selfish.” There is nothing heroic about being selfish. Yet, when we do not treat the marital embrace with the same reverence as our wedding vows, it will lead to our down fall because they are our promise made in the flesh.
So what can we do? As with all sacraments, pray for grace to love. Pray for the grace to remind yourself what you are doing (becoming a saint) and that you have someone to help you. If you do this, even a broken marriage can lead you to holiness. All marriages have brokenness in them because two broken people are there. But don’t let that stop you because you are here to be saints. If your marriage is hard that means you can become an even greater saint, if you allow how God is purifying you and inviting you to be holy. You should encourage your spouse to be holy. You can’t, however, force them to be, that is something you cannot make happen, but one thing is certain, you can become holy and that will often win the other person over. There is a story about a priest who at one time was a married man. He was a jerk to his wife and mocked her faith. When she got sick, he mocked her God even more and when she died he was even angrier until he found her journal and found that she had embraced her sickness, and even death, if that would save her husband. We do not ask to change the other person in order to make our lives easy. We ask for grace to profit, to be purified by what our spouse does. Marriage is a great, holy and beautiful sacrament and we have to ask for the grace to remind us of what we are doing and that is, using our daily life to help us become saints and save the world by allowing Christ to save us, to perfect His power in our weakness.