No matter whether a couple stands in front of a judge, or a priest, minister, or rabbi, or stands by themselves under a palm tree on a desert island, we marry each other. Our motivations, our eyes choosing to meet for life, our hands joining to pledge mutual self-giving, fidelity, and commitment, seal the deal. The great sadness for me is that today, for some people, the choice of whom to marry has been reduced to the level of what car to buy and use for the next few years.
Marriage is choosing to say "yes" to one person, ideally for the rest of one's life. To sexually become one flesh is a potent sign that we now have one life, one love, one heart for our family and for the world. Even in the midst of the fiercest argument, the internal conviction that my husband doesn't understand me at all, the deepest part of me still remembers our eyes meeting, our hands touching, our swearing before God and the human family, that we would persevere. And remembrance of the painful moments make the moments of reconciliation and new commitment even sweeter.
Think of how powerful a sign marriage is to the world! For those who believe in God, marriage is an encounter with God Who is Love, and God's love shines on their faces. The marriage union is a visible, touchable sign, an icon, of God's unswerving commitment to and union with His beloved people whom He has made in His Image and Likeness. The depth with which your spouse and you love each other can remind others of the depth with which God loves them. And, if God is the heart and soul of your marriage, His love is continually springing up like a fountain in you, refreshing and renewing your love - even and perhaps most when you'd like to turn away from your spouse's face!
And, as God's love overflows in the boundless creativity of generating a universe, so a couple's love overflows into the creation of new life: children. As God is endlessly open to new life, a couple marries with the expectation of creating new life together. This is their joy! And if this can't happen, there is always the joy of adoption as a choice they can make together. When a couple gives birth to a child, what a sign of hope for the world!
The word "sacrament" means "an encounter with God." A Christian marriage is a sacramental union. Pope Francis says
"The sacrament is not a 'thing' or a 'power,' for in it Christ himself 'now encounters Christian spouses...He dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another's burdens.' Christian marriage is a sign of how much Christ loved his Church in the covenant sealed on the cross, yet it also makes that love present in the communion of the spouses."
When you look into your spouse's eyes, feel the warmth of his or her hand holding yours, hear those words of love which fill your soul with the sweetness of honey, you are experiencing God loving you and saving you through your spouse. Does that sound too grand to you, when you think of yourselves in grubby sweats cleaning toilets for each other or sweating up on a roof replacing shingles for love? No - that's the essence of saving one another. For Christians, we are called to save one another's souls with the same self-sacrifice with which Christ saved his people by living a human life of sweat and work and then by dying on the cross. Christ dwells with us and holds us together through the strength of our sacramental love for one another.
Our lives as family parallel the lives of the Holy Family. I see a loving father crying over a child high on drugs whom he will not desert, and I see Christ's eyes weeping and filled with blood from the crown of thorns he wore for us. I see a loving mother taking her child in a wheelchair shopping, and I see Christ walking the streets of Jerusalem patiently carrying his cross. As I watch a grieving wife at her husband's wake, I remember Jesus weeping over the death of Lazarus, and Mary his mother, grieving the death of her beloved husband Joseph. As I remember my inconsolable grief as I knelt beside my son in his coffin, I remember how the image of Mary holding her dead son infused my soul with strength and hope in his rising from the dead - because I pictured the joy of Mary holding a resurrected Christ.
When a couple makes love, intensely, playfully, reconciling, those loving actions and words strengthen and express their ongoing love for each other. That sexual love is so magnificent, Pope Francis says, that it can remind us of the magnificent love God had and has for us by becoming one with our human flesh, "marrying" our human flesh, in the person of His Son Jesus.
All of us are members of families. All of us know that nothing is as painful as a bitter argument with a spouse or a family member. No one can "jerk our chains" or make us madder quicker than the faults or quirks of a spouse or family member. Yet, on the other hand, no one can give us such incandescent joy as being close to and enjoying a spouse or family member. This joyful love is a foretaste of heaven! It is the beginning of heaven on earth!
During those family gatherings when our eyes roam the room and see here a divorced member or there a disabled member or there someone who is battling an addiction or a mental illness, - even there when we see the pain and the suffering and the imperfect-ness, we see the love that binds us together. Christ is there present with every member of our family, in each one's soul, and Christ is binding and holding us all together. The joy in our hearts he has placed there to remind us that one day we will be totally one with him and totally one with each other, in the fullness of love and joy.
May our prayer every day be for God to give an outpouring of His Love and His Spirit on every married couple, every family on earth - and on every couple struggling in that direction. So many couples cohabit today without benefit of marriage. May our example and our guiding love give them the vision of what marriage should and can be, especially when it is grounded in God.