Marriage: A profound and holy union of man and woman

In last month’s issue of the South Texas Catholic, “The Assent of Love,” we raised the question of what it means to love and love well.

We proposed that authentic love requires an assent, or yes, to rise above oneself for the sake of the beloved. Simply stated, true love requires ascension, or rising above our own brokenness, in order to live for the good of the beloved. This rising necessitates our freely given consent, or yes, to be moved by a higher power, namely God’s love.

This conjugal consent to love can in some ways become a creed, a profession of what the couple believes. Consider the questions asked of a couple entering into the sacrament of matrimony, “Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage? Will you love and honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives? Will you accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and His church?”

Presumably every couple entering into the sacrament of marriage has responded positively to these questions, giving their assent with the words “I do” and inferring “I do so believe and will do it.”

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church we read that when we profess the creed with the whole church, we are really saying ‘I believe’, or ‘I pledge myself to what we believe.’ (CCC 185)  To say the creed with faith is to enter into communion with the Holy Trinity and with the whole church; it is to enter into the “great mystery” of the marriage of the bridegroom Christ and His bride, the church.

This understanding of the profession of faith gives rise to the form of a “conjugal” creed contained in the words of consent by which man and woman become husband and wife. This “creedal” statement is confirmed in a particular profession of love specific to marriage. “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.” (CCC 1601)

While the nature of the sacrament of matrimony is directed to the service of communion with Christ, this is accomplished by the sacrificial acts of love that husbands and wives are called upon to make on behalf of their spouse and children. These acts are only possible by the power of Christ acting through the spouses on behalf of His bride, the church. His Paschal act of suffering and rising is the great mystery through which the road to holiness must pass if we are to enter into proper union in Christ as men and women.

Left to our own devices, and the diseased images we act upon and call human love, we could never attain the deep union and intimacy God desires for us. Marriage is, after all, a rather messy business. Christ’s marriage to His bride is consummated through his passion and death! If spouses are to love as Christ loves, how could it be otherwise? Marriage will inevitably involve a similar agony, the same mingling of blood, sweat and tears, the same rending of heart and soul that Christ encountered.

But it is only by embracing the purifying suffering of love that we can experience its ecstasies and glory. Even in the midst of His greatest agony Christ remained mysteriously consoled in the eternal, loving embrace of the Father. This is the hope of all who love, that their suffering will not be for naught but will lead to an inexpressible joy.

If husbands and wives are to climb to the heights of love and enter into that profound and holy union to which they have been called, they must learn to help one another see the fullness of God’s plan for married love.

All too often spouses fail to recognize the calling to ascend to the heights of that love because the world around them holds them to a lower standard of unity, which, in fact is not unity but disunity. This disunity is the result of embracing the diabolical distortion of the beauty of authentic love for a lesser, self-directed desire that they wrongly believe will make them happy.

This distortion leads to husbands and wives forgetting the conjugal creed they professed in their consent to marriage. They accept the lie of contraception that promises freedom but is always opposed to life. They buy into the idea that if the going gets too tough, the tough get going and seek divorce. They begin to believe that death is the end of all things and that they seek entitlement to end their suffering whenever they determine it is too much.

More than anything, they deny what it is to be created in the image and likeness of God, an image and likeness of sacrificial love and a life of eternal glory. Once they have accepted this lie and denied their vocation as man and wife according to God’s plan, they put on the image and likeness of the one who is opposed to God.

We should find this image disturbing. If we do, we need to encourage one another to return to the creed we profess with the whole church, and as couples, return to the consent we gave when we entered marriage. Let us work together to restore marriage to its proper place as a profound and holy union between man and woman.