Seeking the Face of the Lord

Marriage: A sacrament of love lived in the real world

This week, The Criterion features its Spring Marriage Supplement. As I thought about what I might offer as a reflection on the theme, I was drawn back to my thoughts at our last cathedral celebration of marriage anniversaries.

So many things have changed during the last 50 years. In fact, so much has changed during the last 25 years. There have been remarkable technological improvements that have done a lot to make life more efficient and more comfortable. Transportation, communication, health services of all kinds, entertainment and sports; in almost any realm of life we can look at, there have been so many, in fact, incredible improvements. In many ways, life has been made easier.

What has happened to marriage and family life in that same period of time? Our society is trying to cope with almost a 50 percent rate of marriages that don’t work. We worry about latchkey kids and single-parent homes and broken families, not to mention sad things like child abuse, family drug problems, and an almost endless list of worries about marriage and family life. External developments have not made marriage easier. There may be greater conveniences all around, but the environment is not necessarily marriage-friendly.

It is a blessed family that can give thanks to God for parents who have been and are able to nurture their marriage and a wonderful family through the good times and the bad. In contrast to the secular phenomenon of serial marriages or simply couples living together without the covenant of marriage, what marvelous witness fidelity in marriage is in our times. Our annual archdiocesan celebration of couples who have been married 50, 60 and more years is one of my favorite events. The assembly is radiant.

No couple, no matter how deep their love is on the day of their marriage, can make it through the good times and the bad, through sickness and health until death without the grace of God. And so couples come to church on their wedding day to ask for God’s help. Couples come to ask God to be a third partner in their married life. However romantic their wedding day may be, mature couples realize that they need God’s help.

If a wife and husband want to have a blessed family life, they never give up going to church, faithfully, regularly, in the hard times and in the good times, when convenient or inconvenient. Blessed couples are people of simple faith, and they are also as down-to-earth and hard-working and fun-loving as any people you can find.

Centuries ago, St. John Chrysostom gave the following advice to Christian couples: “Show your wife you appreciate her company a lot and that you prefer to be home rather than outside, because she is there. Show her a preference among all your friends and even above the children she has given you; love them because of her … Pray all together … Learn the fear of God; everything else will flow from this like water from a fountain and your house will be filled with bounty” (Twentieth homily on the Letter to the Ephesians).

Of course, the famous Church orator intended the advice for husband and wife mutually.

But the generous love of a married couple extends beyond the family house, within the limits of possibility, of course. When extended family or neighbors or strangers are in trouble, a generous couple is there, even at great cost, even if it hurts to get there. That’s how God’s grace works out in a faithful Christian married life. The vocation within Christian marriage is to be a sacrament, a channel of God’s love to neighbor. And Christ enlarged the meaning of family to include a neighbor in need.

It works the other way around as well. God’s grace comes home for wife and husband in the sacrament of marriage through family and friends and others who reach out their love to them. God’s grace doesn’t come home only in church and at formal prayer. It comes through people around us, too.

I mentioned that so many good things have made life better in modern times. And I mentioned how life has been troubled, too. But one of the good things, like a beacon of light when life may seem dark, is the down-to-earth example of faithfully married couples. That is more important for us than all the other developments and conveniences.

Marriage is a sacrament of love lived in the real world. Sometimes married love may be hard work. It will not always be lived perfectly, but where love is grounded in faith and enriched by God’s grace, even in difficulties, there can be beauty and deep meaning in life. †