Meditations for Layfolks - Matrimony

Here our Lord makes sacred the most intimate act of life, wherein two become one flesh. The purpose of the married state He has Himself commanded, and it cannot, therefore, be in itself evil. Without it the race would cease to exist, and all the designs of God come to naught; it is consequently essential to the economy of the Divine Plan. From this, then, we may quite rightly argue that not merely is it not evil in itself, but a great good. Indeed, God Himself ordained it as a command upon all His creatures that they should increase and multiply and, as though to remove for ever from His children any fear of its being evil, He has in the New Law made a sacrament to safeguard its interests and to ensure its proper fulfillment. Marriage itself is an act whereby two are made one in mutual love. All the other ideas that have gathered round the family life have sprung from this as the primal idea. The concept of a family and of even wider relationships, the hoarding of possessions and the encampment or settlement in a house, the setting up of a sacred hearth round which the family might assemble to ask the protection of its own particular deity, have all evolved out of the rudimentary notion that by marriage two have become one. What ever may be the theories by which we explain the origin of the family and these theories are as numerous as the professors in universities we are forced to suppose that the two came together who were before looked upon, as we say, as "single," and that from this they became one two notes in complete harmony, a union that transcends all difference.

Now it is perfectly clear from any study of human nature that the whole tendency of individuals, especially when thrown into each other's company, is to separation: the ideas of two tend on the whole to spring apart: the very fact that the other person holds a view is reason sufficient for holding its opposite. Especially is this likely to happen where two are for ever facing each other at all times of day, in moments of irritability, in all moods and tempers. The very likeness in taste or temperament or habit is bound to appear at times when it should not, and to produce friction that will lead to serious trouble unless it is treated with a tact which is rare to find and still rarer to find continuously. The effect of a family, which should prove a bond by linking the parents together in a mutual love of at least a third person, in fact turns sometimes to the other result and produces such divergence of views on education, etc., as to produce, rather than peace, ultimate estrangement. Of course, the answer to all this is, that it supposes the absence of love, whereas the idea of marriage is based on love, and apart from love has no significance. Once let love come in, and then the things that might prove a source of difference result on the whole in a deeper affection. Difference itself becomes a bond of union; the two souls become complementary to one another; each supplies what is lacking to the other. This is true. It is obvious that love does bridge over the chasm and holds souls together. But is not this, too, part of the danger? For though love unites as can nothing else, so long as love is there, what is to happen at those times when love is least powerful? when human charms cease to appeal or by their satisfaction have extinguished all desire? Love is strong while it lasts; but who shall guarantee love lasting?

It is just here that the sacrament of marriage enters into its place in the stream of Catholic tradition. It brings to love the safeguard of a divine protection. It wards off the approach of dulness and boredom by illuminating the whole of family life with the outpouring of love divine. The Spirit of God in virtue of the Passion of Christ sets in the soul the power to hold on in spite of every difficulty. It adds to love the wisdom and discernment to allow to each that freshness and spontaneity that is required for the full tale of love. When pleasure in such a life might make men forget the responsibilities of their high calling, it is the infusion of grace that brings back the vision of earlier days. It is the sacrament that makes the father and mother realize that they have duties to perform to their race, and holds them to the labour and travail whence is born the joy of the world. Abolish this, and in how many cases would not the result be the end of the -family, often the end of the national existence? So highly has the married life been exalted by this sacrament that Saint Paul, to whom in many ways the single life evidently made personal appeal, sets it up as the very image of the intimate union that exists between Christ and His Church: so high is it in his eyes that it stands as a great mystery, that is, a shrine of the dwelling of God. For a Catholic, therefore, the married state is itself a high calling from God. The duties therein incurred are of divine origin, blessed by God, and safeguarded by the grace that this attracts; they have become the living symbols of God's union with man. Mutual acceptance means one single law of faithfulness for both, which no amount of custom or tradition can be allowed to impair. Thus does the blood of Christ make holy a calling that is the exact reproduction of the central fact of the Christian revelation, for it takes God to make a family.

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.