A brief review

A certain frustration on your part is understandable. After all, we started with a deceptively simple question: “Why bother with a Christian Marriage?” And after two Blogs and several thousand words, we are just now getting to the definitive answers to that first question.

In our first Blog, we saw that the human/cultural reasons for getting married are not really very convincing. So in a way, it is understandable when a man and a woman decide to just live together without all the “fuss” of getting married. After all, it means sex whenever it is wanted, fine dining, nice travels and general expressions of love and commitment to each other. Children are, most often, not in the mix; “Maybe later.” God is more or less irrelevant. So what’s the problem? “We’re happy – maybe an occasional blow-up but generally we’re doing real well.” The difficulty arises when a crisis of one sort or another confronts the couple – the relationship simply does not have the depth to enter into the struggles and sufferings of human relationship. Life has been lived in a “flat” environment, ultimately focused on oneself. In front of a crisis, the egos prevail, opinions are dictated and shouting and fighting emerge with many tears and frustrations.

God then intervenes out of love for this couple by showing them another couple, a family that is able to enter into the suffering of human lives with a kind of joy that is beyond our reason. When asked, this married couple simply says: “We are married in the Catholic Church, we are living our lives with a joy that is founded on the giving of our lives to each other without limitation. Our children, a result of our being open to life, are a sign to the world of our intimacy and of the love of God in brining forth new life – a sure sign of love!”

This married couple produces many questions in the couple that is just living together. Questions like: Why did we meet? Where are we going? What is our destination? Our mission? We saw that the uniqueness of each person was in the mind of God from the beginning and that it is through the plan of God that they have met. The purpose then is to make present in their world a new kind of love where they are giving of their lives to each other. But very quickly, the unmarried guy and girl realized that they cannot love the other completely – they realize that they cannot give of their life to the other. The question then is: “How are you able to love your man even when he is such a jerk?” Our answer was that a new nature is required. Who has this nature that can love beyond human capacity? This is where Jesus Christ makes his appearance. The nature of Jesus Christ is the one who loves the other without limit, ready to give his life, out of love for the other. Human nature cannot do this.

So we come to this Third and final Blog where we will answer the starting question of this whole journey: “Why bother with a Christian Marriage?”

what is the purpose of a christian marriage?

Our deepest longing really is to live by giving of ourselves to the other rather than living just for myself, my self satisfaction. To give our life and love like this in a couple relationship is to have this new nature of Jesus Christ because this nature gives us the fullness of joy and meaning to both man and woman and to their oneness as a married couple. This nature of Jesus Christ is central to the Christian Marriage and in that Marriage the strength to live a full life of going outside of oneself to the other is fulfilled.

So now the purpose of the Christian Marriage is coming into focus. A couple enters Marriage fully realizing that they have been chosen from before the world began to make present in their world, a love that the culture desperately needs to experience. What love? A Love that makes present the very hand of God – a Love that forms a couple into a oneness and from that oneness, new life is revealed.

The purpose of the Christian Marriage is to make present a couple who wants to fulfill their mission to reveal to the world a radically new kind of love and to be open to building a Christian family.

Why get married in the Catholic Church?

Now the question is (what a lot of questions!): do you really want this life of a Christian Marriage where the mission to be two in one flesh and to be open to children? If so, the Catholic Church offers the Sacrament of Marriage to a Catholic couple (or a Catholic and Christian). This Sacrament provides the means to fulfill this mission by walking in the Church as a Christian family. The Sacrament provides the grace (the God given gift of strength) to live and love as Christ lives and loves.

In speaking with Catholic couples contemplating marriage, the movement from the purely human reasons for marrying to a recognition that their marriage is an event of God acting in their lives is a totally grace-filled moment. So now the operative questions are:

 What is the meaning of the Sacrament of Marriage?

A sacrament is a very different reality in our world – it is a reality that is created by Christ, constantly created, and is offered to a Catholic with special help or assistance to love as Christ loves. This creation of Christ is shown to us through a visible sign, through a religious ritual which is not a human construction. So in a Catholic Marriage, this sign, this religious expression is made present through the celebration of the Sacrament of Marriage. The couple then receives and continues to receive special help, which we call grace, to live together where the focus is on the other person. When we live our married life, where we love the other not so we are loved in return but where we love the other out of sheer willingness to give our life for the other person. Why? – simply because this is why we were created and brought together as a couple in the plan of God. This is incredibly freeing! Now, the meaning of our Marriage is made visible. Now, when crises come we have a foundation on which to stand, a foundation that is not built on our own strength but is built on faith and belief that Jesus Christ exists in each of us. Precisely in that interior existence, brought to the couple by the Church, the depth of why the couple was formed is revealed. The everyday life of the couple with its joys, hopes and sorrows is then made possible through the grace, the special help given through the Sacrament of Marriage.

The great gift of children

There is a clear unwillingness, a clear decisiveness among young couples in today’s culture to avoid having children. The birthrate continues to decline both in the US and world-wide. In many countries, the birthrate has dropped below the replacement rate. Couples offer a variety of reasons for their decision not to have children. Included in these reasons is not wanting to contribute to over population (“the world has too many people already”), as well as not having the financial resources to have a child. But underneath all the reasons is the self-centeredness of our human nature which does not want to be put into situations that we cannot control (See our first blog.) Birth control is remarkably easy compared to earlier generations so that within this ease of not having children lies the root of the decision. “We have a lot on our plate, we need each other sexually, but we just can’t take a child now.”

The Beauty and Wonder of Children

Yet to see a married couple with children is to see much more than just a father and mother and kids. The children are the visible sign of the exchange of love between the man and the woman. The ejection and insertion of life giving sperm into a receptive place where a life seeking egg awaits penetration is one of the great wonders of the human person. When sexual intercourse is begun, to enter into the love making with an openness to life is to make love with a great freedom. This is so because the intimacy is now not just focused on the couple (this is not to minimize the joy and fulfillment of sexual intercourse!) but is open to the possibility of new life – life created by God and made real through the couple. So the children are not only a sign of the love exchanged between father and mother but also a sign of the creative action of God in this married couple.

So don’t be afraid! Our culture introduces this fear – a fear that is ultimately one of losing our independence, our freedom. But to be open to having children is just the opposite! We then freely give ourselves to each other as husband and wife and to our children as parents. As we have said repeatedly in these blogs, this giving is the source of true freedom. How can we ever describe the joy in a father introducing his son or sons, or a mother announcing to the world that she is pregnant again with another life within her? The world scoffs at this and in fact, increasingly will demand restrictions imposed by the culture. How can we ever describe the great mystery when parents stand back and see thier children, grand children and great grandchildren in front of them? They quickly realize that all is the work of God in which they have played a role, even a central role!

Marriage is both a great joy and also a great suffering. Somehow couples today realize this. Somehow you realize this. When you face your interior doubts honestly and without pretense, you also suffer from the tension of having sex outside of marriage (which, BTW, has a name: fornication), a suffering that has its origin in a religious culture (e.g., Christian, Jewish) that reserves sexual intercourse for marriage. To come forth for marriage in the Catholic Church is to present oneself as a Christian ready to embrace a way of life that has foundations both in the real world of life on earth and the expanded reality of createdness for eternal life. What does this mean? Simply, that the couple says:

“Yes, I will agree to the Church’s wisdom in its teaching regarding the Christian two-fold purpose of marriage:

for the good of the couple, and

for the procreation and education of children.”

So now we finish! Why bother with a Christian Marriage? It is simply to begin to respond to this very heart of our existence , to want to give our life for my spouse, to give my life for any children God desires to give us and then to be a sign of Love to our world.

What a mission this is! What a great joy can be ours if we are open to a radically different way of life from that of the prevailing culture!