By refusing to respond to our call to love, too many of us offend our own dignity, destroy our own self-esteem, and foster alienation in our marriages. We are constantly being tempted to play manipulative games with our mates, valuing our own convenience and comfort above all else. When we do this, husbands and wives slowly turn each other into “bitches,” “avoiders,” or — at best — shriveled-up, bitter, emotional scorekeepers. What we need to be doing is turning each other into saints. Thank God, by learning how to use the graces of marriage, we can. Nothing can come between those couples who believe the fulfillment of their identities in Christ is inextricably tied to the success of their marital partnership. Nothing can embitter those couples that understand their role in preparing each other to share the joy of God’s heavenly kingdom. When a husband and wife respond to their innate call to love and work to fulfill each other’s Christian destinies, they open the door to a truly vital, loving, spiritual, sacramental marriage. They guarantee that they will remain both faithful and joyful together through good times and bad, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, loving and cherishing each other until they deliver their mate to the heavenly Father, who will smile upon them and say, “Well done, [my] good and faithful servant” (Mt 25:21).
Living the Dream: Because You’re Worth It!
Living this vision of marriage and overcoming the common challenges to this vision takes spending more time, commitment, and energy on your marriage than many people do. But isn’t it worth it? If you do this work, you can have the kind of marriage that will make the angels smile and the neighbors sick with jealousy! If you commit to this work, you will have the kind of marriage that fills your days with true joy, real passion, incredible depth of meaning, and surprising strength in times of trial. In short, you will have the love your heart longs for — the love that comes from God’s own heart. You will experience a love that will mold and shape both of you as a couple into everything you were created to be in this life and enable you to celebrate heaven as the Eternal Wedding Feast (Rev 19:6-9)!
Chapter 2
The Celebration of a Lifetime
The Two Become One
Weddings are a cause for celebration. Jesus himself showed what an occasion for joy weddings are when he performed his first miracle at the wedding feast at Cana, transforming jars of water into the choicest wine (Jn 2:1-12). We want to help you discover how you can celebrate your marriage and experience the incredible joy that comes from living the fullness of the Catholic vision of married love!
In the last chapter, we examined what made the Catholic vision of marriage special and unique among all the many different visions of love. Specifically, you discovered that Catholic couples promise to spend their lives learning how to love each other freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully. When a couple strives to live out this unique vision of love in their relationship, God blesses them in two special and important ways. First, he empowers them to celebrate an incredible Christian union — a miraculous degree of togetherness that melts two selves into one. Second, he empowers them to celebrate a life-giving love. Both of these blessings are cause for the couple to celebrate the gift of their marriage over the course of a lifetime!
Historically, these two blessings have been known as the “ends,” or goals, of marriage (i.e., the unitive and procreative ends), but they are more than duties married couples serve or jobs married couples do. Rather, they are gifts that married couples receive from God for learning to love each other freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the ways God wants to give you the graces you need to celebrate an incredible Christian union. We’ll look at celebrating the second blessing, life-giving love, in Chapter 3.
Celebrating an Incredible Christian Union
We know that, in marriage, two become one (Mk 10:8). While that sounds pretty and poetic, this idea has practical significance for your marriage. There are two major ways to celebrate an incredible Christian union.
The first is by striving to rebuild the original unity of man and woman.
The second is to actively and intentionally work together to fulfill your identities in Christ. Let’s look at each of these.
Rebuilding the Original Unity of Man and Woman
It can sometimes feel like men and women are from two different planets — Mars and Venus, if you like. Some people even think that husbands and wives are so different that they should never expect to truly understand each other, much less be best friends. In this view, supposedly, women are communicative, sensitive, emotive, relational, nurturing, loving, and supportive. Men, on the other hand, like football.
And never the twain shall meet.
If this is true of our experience today — and sadly, for many, it is — then we need to remember that this is not the way God intended, or intends, it to be. In his Theology of the Body, St. John Paul the Great reminded us that before original sin entered the world, there was a perfect union and a deep, intimate connection between man and woman that was rooted in their mutual love for God and their desire to do his will. St. John Paul II referred to this state of intimate connection as the original unity of man and woman (St. John Paul II, 2006).
Illustrating this union, Genesis tells us that when God created woman, Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Please note that Adam did not say — to quote My Fair Lady’s Professor Henry Higgins — “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
The estrangement and confusion present-day men and women experience around one another is a direct result of original sin. Clearly, it is not the way things ought to be. The “regrettable apple incident” was to men and women what the Tower of Babel was to the world.
Winning the “Battle” of the Sexes
The good news is that God, through marriage, gives us the grace we need to begin to restore the authentic partnership Adam and Eve experienced with each other, and to overcome the false differences that keep men and women at odds (as opposed to the authentic differences that facilitate partnership between men and women). These false differences constitute the tension between men and women that people refer to as the “Battle of the Sexes.” True, we post-fallen people can’t achieve the complete union that Adam and Eve experienced with each other and God (at least not this side of heaven). But through God’s grace and our good efforts, there is much we can do in this life to bridge the gap that exists between genders.
Theologically speaking, this is the grace underlying what is known as the “unitive end” of marriage. When a man and woman freely and completely give themselves to each other, they commit to spending their lives becoming fluent in each other’s “languages.” By doing this, men and women can learn to celebrate the deep level of friendship and understanding that is born of helping one another become fully human persons. By learning to love and serve one another more perfectly, day-by-day, they help each other develop the missing parts of themselves. “And the two shall become one” (Mt 19:5).
Of course, saying that God gives us the grace to overcome false, or invalid, differences between men and women is not to deny that there are real differences between the sexes. But the true differences between men and women are much more subtle and profound than the polarized, overly simplistic definitions to which many in our society cling (e.g., “Men are rational, and women are emotional”; “Men don’t do housework and don’t take care of small children, and women shouldn’t work out of the home,” etc.). As moral theologian William May explains in his book Marriage: The Rock on Which the Family Is Built, gender differences are supposed to be differences in “emphasis.”
Celebrating the True Differences Between Man and Woman
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