The Wonder of God's Will and the Holiness of Marriage

The Will of God is a beautiful mystery that evokes wonder and adoration.  The sluggish and self-indulgent heart is unable to fall down in adoration because it is asleep to the glory of God echoing through the world.   It is only the vigilant heart, the heart that hungers and thirsts for justice, that is ready to welcome beatitude.  My heart goes to this mystery this summer as I consider the crucifixion of marriage taking place in our society.

Powerful cultural and political interests have imposed their values on the humble and the poor once again.   The President and various state governments have acted as good chief priests while the Supreme Court and many other judiciary bodies have all played the role of Pilate perfectly.  But they are not the only guilty parties.  Each of us, in various ways, great and small, by our own petty sins against the sanctity of marriage and family life, have also chanted crucify, crucify!

All this has happened this summer even while holy women and beloved disciples reverently take down the institutional corpse to carry it to its cultural tomb.  How could marriage not die laid bear to the hidden violence of fornication, artificial contraception, abortion, and divorce?  The faithfulness and integrity that traditional family life demands is not sustainable in the context of our oversexed and banal culture.  If petty bickering and mean-spiritedness have always threatened this most holy of friendships, government does not feel obliged to protect these sacred bonds, not even for the sake of children who have a right not only to life but also to the love of a mother and father.   So, as authentic marriage is buried in the tomb of artificial and politically correct social contracts, it is right to weep over the fact that something good, holy and true has died in our nation.

It is into this mystery that we must take up the task of prayer.  God is revealing something astonishing to us if we will only look for it and allow the sorrowful events that took place in our country this summer to pierce us to the heart.  It is a matter of compunction.  To begin to pray means to allow ourselves to be vulnerable to the wonder of God's Will even in the face of the crucifixion and death of marriage -- because it is only by surrender to His holy and ineffable Will that we glimpse His mercy and allow Him to bring to birth in our hearts unvanquished hope.

Wilfrid Stinissen makes an powerful observation in Into Your Hands, Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God who Loves Us (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011).  God's will is disclosed and manifested by opposition to it.  This is exactly what happened to Christ Jesus.  When He was opposed unto death on the Cross, the mercy of God for the world was revealed.  God the Father permitted His only begotten Son to be crucified so that His saving will might be made known.  Father Stinissen explains: "God makes use of evil in such a superb way and with such skill that the result is better than if there had never been evil."

To see this in relation to marriage requires a certain purification of our faith, a purification that comes through prayer and repentance.  The disciples did not start out with a clear understanding of Christ's humiliating death.  They began with bewilderment and confusion.  We, like them, must not walk away from this experience or try to forget it or attempt to convince ourselves that it is not important.  Just as the evil of human acts temporarily blinded the first disciples from seeing the wonder of God's will, our own conversion starts when we allow the Lord to walk with us and question us about where we are going with our lives.   Just as Christ's crucifixion was not opposed to anything that God revealed but rather the fulfillment of it, so too the violence done to marriage and family life in our culture is become another way God will reveal the greatness of His mercy.  Authentic marriage and family life need God and His ways more than ever -- and the beauty of what God does in the bonds of these holy friendships only shines the brighter the more our culture turns to darkness.    

Prayer helps us see that in every abuse of power against marriage and family, the Risen Christ continues to be at work in the lives of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers who turn to Him and rely on Him for their strength.   Happy marriages and holy families are the result of God's presence in the heart that prays, and not the imposition of politically correct values through social engineering.  It was into their shock and lack of faith that the Risen Lord began to disclose Himself to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus.   His saving presence and his patient explanations made their hearts burn until they recognized Him "in the breaking of the bread."  Likewise, we will only begin to recognize how God is raising up marriage when we contemplate it and beg for it in relation to the Sacred Body and Blood that has been offered for our sake.

A Culture of Life and Family Prayer

When Blessed John Paul II came to Denver over twenty years ago, he called on the young people of the world to build a culture of life and civilization of love.   He pointed to prayer, to an encounter with Christ, as the basis of this great undertaking.   One simple way to introduce prayer into our culture, one we have complete control over in the privacy of our homes, is the practice of family prayer.  Family prayer, no matter how informal or chaotic, is a moment of thanksgiving for the gift of life shared together, and a moment of love in which families learn how to bear with one another out of reverence for Christ and how to raise one another up to the Lord.  Genuine progress to life and love can only be realized by such prayer.

This is not to say that society has not been progressing without prayer -- but society without God only progresses through various circles of hell.  A loveless civilization has been progressing out of control for quite sometime, and in the process corrupting all that is holy and true about the American way of life.  Here, Obama Care and the HHS mandate to implement it are simply signs of another stage in the same evolutionary process that brought us Roe vs Wade.  Absolute power over life and death is a divine right, and our government has no fear of God in usurping this role.   A litany of court orders, executive orders, laws and regulations appeal to safety and security with emotive force and righteous indignation.  Each new invocation advances another lifeless and loveless cause, causes which if carefully marketed provide another pretext for the powerful to protect themselves from the dreams and aspirations of what they can only see as an unholy mob.

Prayer allows individuals to bind together as a people in freedom, prayerlessness allows a mob to bind the individual against his will.  The particular form of social progress we are currently enjoying in America goes hand in hand with the ever increasing cultural hostility to prayer we have accepted as a norm.  The more a society progresses down to a prayerless mob, the easier it becomes to manipulate.   Wihout prayer, the promptings of conscience which normally protect communities from implicating themselves in grave social evil are silenced.  This seems to be at work in our culture as we have moved away from prayer and pre-occupied ourselves with all kinds of political rancor and envy, news cycles and narratives.   Although abortion is not as popular as it once was, those we have invested with political or cultural power (for the lastest example, check out the efforts of the Governor of New York) are as adamant as ever about compelling the whole of society to participate in this evil, no matter the dictates of individual consciences.  In fact, compelling whole religious organizations to provide immoral services is now heralded as the next stage of social progress.

The less we pray, the more vulnerable we are to evil, and the weaker our witness to the greatness of our religion.  Like the criminals convicted at Nuremberg trials, people of faith are expected to act against what they know is right because the authorities have ordered them to do so.   When individual members of a society feel compelled to act against what they believe is noble and true, is it any wonder why that whole society should be burdened with every form of unhappiness and misery?  To live in such self-contradiction is to be damned.  No amount of convenience or luxury or diversion can address the weight of unacknolwedged guilt that haunts such a people or overcome the burning alienation from one another abusing and being abused by power causes.  If people of faith forsake prayer in the face of such evil, how can they offer a reason for their hope when such a word of hope is most needed?

For lack of prayer, the gift of freedom has become at risk in America.  A government, even if democratic, always progresses toward unholy forms of tyranny whenever it violates such basic goods as religious freedom, the institution of marriage, the rights of children to maternal and paternal love, and the right to life.  How can a society stand if it will not welcome and nurture the gift of life, if it will not reverence the holiness of marriage, if it will not allow people to follow their moral consciences?  And what kind of wealth does such a people possess if anxiety over it makes them afraid to take care of the most vulnerable and beautiful gifts God bestows?   As Mother Theresa once explained, it is a great poverty to think that a baby must die so that one might live as they wish. Yet a callous poverty is progressively robbing America of the noble destiny God has invited us to share.

Although many Americans have forgotten God, God has not forgotten America.   The noble calling He invites America to accept involves our becoming an even brighter beacon of human freedom than we have ever been before -- and this is possible even now under the current oppressiveness of our government.  Advancing a genuine freedom rooted in the truth demands that we not fear to seek and protect the dignity of the human person -- from womb to tomb.  This dignity can only be rightly seen and fully protected by prayer.

Prayer makes space for love.  This is true in the heart of each believer.  This is true in marriages.  This is true in families.  This is true in communities.   Love, in the form of social friendship, is the only foundation on which civility can be maintained. Real social friendship is not something innate or apriori in human nature.  It is something learned -- in fact it is the hardest thing to learn, because one cannot learn it except at the expense of his own life.  This is exactly why God sent his Son into the World - to show us how to love one another and God, and to give us His own power so that we might begin to relate to God and to one another in ways not subject to death.  Because family prayer (and the family rosary in particular) dispose parents and children to that unfathomable Divine Love Christ makes present in both our social and personal histories, the daily prayer of families together offers a remedy that may help America progress towards that culture of life and civilization of love God has called us to be in the world.

Reverent Love and Family Life

The Christmas Mystery raises prayer to the warmth and light of motherhood and family.   These primordial elements of our common humanity God Himself has made sacred by associating them with Himself.   He did so in a singular way when the Word became flesh, when the source of all Meaning entered into the hardships, doubts, fears, and insecurities of our alienated humanity, a painful existence which so needs to be loved.   When Divinity infused our poverty with its treasures, the very relationship of mother to child was endowed in a particular way with new and eternal meaning, a truth that surpasses all understanding.   Here, the unfathomable reality of what it means to be family is disclosed to the eyes of faith and after all these centuries, we have not even begun to penetrate these riches. 

In our efforts to love one another, to renounce what we think we want so that there is room in our lives for family and new life, to be patient with the sorrows we inevitably cause each other, to persevere with one another’s weakness, to defer to one another, to resist contention and false judgment, to speak the truth with love even at the risk of being misunderstood, to share a reason for our hope, to be merciful even to the point of appearing to be taken advantage of; in all of this, when lived out with the same tender reverence that Mary and Joseph showed one another in their own struggles to make a home for the Christ-child; in this very effort, though fraught with all kinds of weakness and inadequacy, failures and shortcomings, trials and hardships, a joyful echo of the Father’s saving whisper into the heart of humanity resounds; a whisper to which faith listens and hears anew, amid angel’s choirs, those divine but distressed cries in the darkness of a cold night wrapped in our swaddling clothes.

The Mystery of Faithful Love - living signs needed today now more than ever

John Paul II once told priests not to let their "yes" to God become a "no."   This is true not only for priests but for anyone who is consecrated for love and by love.  Besides the priesthood, marriage is a kind of consecration one makes with another person to reveal the indissoluble and faithful love of Christ.  Because Christ's love for the Church cannot be broken, this bond in the sacrament of matrimony is also indissoluble.   Holy Orders and consecrated life also involve irrevocable commitments.  Yet this is exactly what love wants to do - commit itself irrevocably.   This is because love tends to the likeness of the Lord - and God is love.  Whatever our state in life, our solemn pledges establish us in the unfathomable mystery of this faithful love.  Since He has loved us unto death, such pledges are also unto death. It is on the basis of the irrevocable nature of God's love for us that John Paul II appealed to priests to be faithful and whatever our state in life, we need to apply this appeal to our own situation as well.

There is a very grave spiritual dimension to such a life commitment: if anyone tries to break a marriage or any other consecrated way of life, they do great violence to themselves and everyone around them.    Forsaking marriage or religious life or the priesthood is always gravely harmful on both a personal and societal level.  It robs everyone of a sign of God's faithfulness which is owed them by the pledge that one has made.

Pledging the gift of self in love is completely so like the Lord, so God-like, that it requires Divine help to fulfill such a commitment.  It is our dignity to make such an irrevocable gift of self and God always provides the grace for this if we ask.  We must believe in his love more than we believe in human weakness.  If you get married or are ordained or make any other kind of vows with the thought in the back of your mind that "should things get too rough there is an escape hatch" - well, it does not seem to be a very mature pledge of oneself and it certainly does not seem to be anything "like" the way God has chosen to love us.  One does not need God to be faithful in such circumstances.  But when you freely choose to embrace something with the resolve that "no matter what, by the help of God, I have got to make  this work" -- well this is a whole new game.  God can do something with you because you have placed yourself in a situation in which you must rely on Him.

What about those times when we are betrayed and abandoned, when all our deepest aspirations are crushed, when we are misunderstood and taken advantage of, when we stand before the antithesis of all we hoped to achieve by our pledge of love, when disappointment, bitterness and resentment knock at the door of our hearts and when there seems to  be no love left at all?  And, what about those times when we cause such things or do them to those who are entrusted to us?     What about our weaknesses and our dignity?  There is no nice cliche to offer those who find themselves at the foot of the Cross, except to point to the One whom we have pierced and to bring such questions to Him in prayer.  When we trust in Him especially in these circumstances, He is able to reveal his glory.  He will whisper the secret of faithful love when such love seems most impossible to find.

God needs living signs of His faithful love in the world.  Whether we are married or religious, priests or deacons; we who have consecrated ourselves or been consecrated by love and for love must not allow our "yes" to God to become a "no."  Although there are tragic and impossible situations, whenever by ardent prayer we choose to be faithful to one another and to God, it allows God to signify, to show forth his unfailing faithfulness to the world.

The Spirituality of Faithful Love

Marriage contains a spirituality primordially established by God and redeemed by the blood of Christ.  In marriage, God joins what no man can separate and when this is done with Christian faith, the Risen Lord raises up this love as a sign to reveal the nuptial meaning of all of creation.  Grace-imbued married love affords a true opportunity to step up into the mystery of being fully human and fully alive.  When marriage becomes a school of love it attains an eternal quality: it glorifies the living God.  This is why the capacity of a man and woman to solemnly pledge themselves to one another in an indissoluble friendship of faithful love open to the gift of life is so sacred, so beautiful, so worthy of being protected.

This sacred capacity cannot be aped even if those who think we are but apes try to do so.  No pretense of marriage lays claim to the sacredness manifest in the love of husband and wife.  Such artificial attempts are merely different forms of fornication. Fornication always dehumanizes.  It is a counterfeit of the real thing.  In these relationships, what St. Augustine says of Pagan Rome applies: whatever joy is attained has the fragile brilliance of crystal, a joy for outweighed by the fear it will be shattered in an instant.

When a man and a woman fall in love with each other, they see at once how very different the other is and at the same time they cannot imagine ever being whole without this difference in their life.   It is impressed on anyone who has tasted this realization, even if only briefly, in God's love for us, He did not create us simply to function and exist.  He created us to thrive to the full, and to help one another thrive.  Just as a man and woman discover in their differences a desire for communion, God likewise looks on us and yearns for us, and this divine regard stirs something in us for Him.

This is why Marriage is a communion of love which reveals God's presence to the world.  Accordingly, God is very concerned about this particular institution. protecting it and promoting it throughout the history of salvation.  Christ's first miracle was performed at a wedding banquet out of concern for protecting the reputation of the Bridegroom and the Bride.  God designed marriage with so many graces, joys and consolations to support it because He knew this communion would push humanity beyond itself, into places it could not bear alone.  This is why the redemptive work of Christ extends to it and transforms it.

Those generous enough to God and to each other to say "yes" to everything marriage is meant to be are driven by a divine passion.  The consolations and joys themselves are not enough for them.  Nor are they aware of sufferings or sacrifices that must be made. They stand firm no matter the cost.

The friendship love of marriage, even the most difficult marriage, speaks to the primordial, faithful and suffering love with which God fashioned our humanity.  God's love is firm and unshaken even if human love sometimes fails to be so.  Marriage can withstand any trial when the spouses together discover their marriage is worth the struggle and that their suffering in love is for a purpose greater than themselves.  More aware of their own shortcomings than those of their beloved, but also more confident in God's love than their own weakness, they turn to God in prayer to provide what they most need that their love might thrive.  When offered with faith and perseverance, such prayers are heard by God and the Lord helps us realize what we cannot realize on our own.

What wisdom do those in married friendship learn in such prayer?  Their eyes twinkle with a holy courage come what come may.  They are so grateful for their friendship, grateful to each other, and grateful to God, that no matter the cost, they would not have it any other way.  True spousal love which the Lord entrusts to us has something in it even stronger than death.  Such love stretches out and yearns to realize the unity of heart and mind which even death cannot vanquish.  To this end, St. John Chrysostom puts these words into the mouth of a husband:

"I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself.  For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us ... I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you."  As cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2365.

Prayer and Fighting for Marriage

One of the ways Mother Teresa of Calcutta fought poverty was she taught families to pray together.  Typically, she would teach the Rosary.   Getting parents to pray with each other and their children gave people hope where there seemed to be none and it helped married couples find love when love seemed most absent.   Ironically, she is said to have stated that the greatest poverty she ever encountered, she discovered here in America.  She was very disturbed to find people dying of loneliness and isolation in our most modern metropolises.  The recent efforts in many States to redefine marriage will only make this particular form of poverty more acute.  It is time for us to learn a lesson from Blessed Teresa and rediscover prayer in our family life.

Mother Teresa was wise to see prayer as something much more than a mere esoteric exercise.  It is vital to the affairs of this world, here and now.  That is why marriage needs prayer.  In fact, it is first of all in marriage that the art of prayer is supposed to be passed on.  If people are losing the fight for marriage in society, it is only because very few marriages are fighting for their love with prayer.  Can anyone adequately defend true love if he does not truly pray? Indeed, only prayer can address the deep seated lack of courage that seems to have taken hold of us in both the public square and our own homes.

So long as people of prayer do not engage the fray and make their voices heard, our families and our society will always be vulnerable to unchallenged and dehumanizing cultural and political forces.  Along these lines and contrary to contemporary prejudice, it is not compassionate to be tolerant of all forms of fornication, contraception, abortion, pornography, prostitution, and divorce.  The truth about the heartache and human carnage left in the wake of such practices must be made known.  Is it really mean-spirited or unenlightened to dare take a stand for what is truly human?  The truth is, even if we do not find sufficient charity in our hearts to do what our faith demands, simple justice requires that we speak up when something as sacred and beautiful as marriage is under attack.  This is true not only in society but also in our own homes.  As Blessed Teresa explains:  "There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives - the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family.  Find them.  Love them."

If there is a failure in courage on our part, it is because, as Christians, we do not pray as we should.  When we do not pray, we do not encounter the Lord and without encountering the Lord, we will never find sufficient confidence to speak the truth in the face of power, or to love in the face of hatred.  Here again, the wisdom of Mother Teresa is helpful:  "Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness."  As cited by EWTN.