Amazingly, this insistence on faithful married love does not always turn off today's teens and young adults, counter-cultural as this is. Recently a millennial wrote on her blog that she had left the Catholic Church, but one of the reasons she finally returned to the Church is because we ARE weird - especially in having sacraments, like the sacrament of Matrimony - Marriage.
I truly believe that the best way to catch and hold young peoples' attention is to challenge them to live an ideal - and a faithful, covenantal, sacramental marriage is the greatest challenge and ideal to hold up to anyone! Sadly, some people don't even think it's possible for two people to love and be faithful to each other until they are parted by death. This is why it's important to add that, in a covenant marriage, a sacramental marriage, the two people do not attempt to pledge fidelity until death by themselves alone: they choose to risk such a love because they choose to be truly, really, drawn up into the faithful, enduring, powerful love of God.
Marriage was not "thought up" by human beings. Marriage is the operating principle by which God works. God, by nature, is faithful, hopeful, passionately loving: God "married" His people Israel; Israel is His Bride. The continuation of God's covenant- sacred pledge of fidelity to Israel - is God's covenant marriage to the Christian Church. God "marries" us in the flesh of Christ. In the Incarnation, God's everlasting commitment to human beings is made with the human flesh of His Son, Who lived among us as our brother, and who truly loved - and loves - us to death. In spite of all of our human spiteful insults and betrayals, and even our torture and murder of the Son of God, Jesus did not turn away from us. Jesus remained faithful to us and even forgave us as he died, in a loving fidelity which still lives on. Jesus is alive and continually heals us of our sins through the gift of his blood.
If we want to understand Jesus' love for us, we can think about this husband's heroic actions during the sniper attack in Las Vegas:
"When gunshots rang out at the Route 91 Harvest Festival Sunday night, 48-year-old Heather Melton says her husband Sonny, 29, jumped into emergency mode - shielding her from the gunfire. Heather says, 'When we realized it was gunshots going off and not fireworks like everyone thought, I said let's get down and he said, 'No, we'll get trampled. Let's go, let's go.'
"He wrapped his arms around my back and as we started to run, I felt him get shot in the back and we went to the ground." (from "The Daily Mail.")
That's what Jesus does for us: wraps his arms around us to shield us from the deadly attacks of temptation and sin, giving his life for us in the process. Jesus graphically, in the flesh, demonstrates the power and totality and humility of God's covenant, marital love for His people.
Marriage is a sacrament, because as two people, in the flesh, give their lives to and for each other, till death parts them, they invite God to participate and empower this love, from the inside of their relationship, as part of it, as the beating Heart of it - because this is how God loves us, totally, faithfully.
From beginningCatholic.com: "The sacraments are chosen instruments of divine power. The exact definition of a sacrament is that it is “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.” We readily can see that there are three distinct ideas contained in that short definition:
- Outward sign
- Instituted by Christ
- To give grace
Outward signs…The outward signs are God’s way of treating us like the human beings we are. He conveys His unseen grace into our spiritual souls through material symbols which our physical bodies can perceive—things and words and gestures.
The outward signs of the sacraments have two parts: the “thing” itself which is used (water, oil, etc.), and the words or gestures which give significance to what is being done.
…Instituted by Christ…We know that no human power could attach an inward grace to an outward sign—not even the divinely guided but humanly applied power of the Church.
Only God can do that.
Which brings us to the second element in the definition of a sacrament: “instituted by Christ.”
Between the time He began His public life and the time He ascended into heaven, Jesus fashioned the seven sacraments. When He ascended into heaven, that put an end to the making of sacraments.
The Church cannot institute new sacraments. There never can be more or less than seven, the seven Jesus has given us: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Reconciliation (Confession or Penance), Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony (Marriage).
Jesus did completely specify the matter and form of some of the sacraments—notably Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. But this does not mean that He necessarily fixed the matter and form of all the sacraments down to the last detail.
Concerning some of the sacraments (Confirmation, for example) He probably left it to His Church, the keeper and the giver of His sacraments, to specify in detail the broad matter and form assigned by Christ.
…To give grace: Coming now to the third element in the definition of a sacrament, we have its essential purpose: “to give grace.”
What kind of grace do the sacraments give?
First and most important of all, they give sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is that marvelous supernatural life, that sharing-in-God’s-own-life that is the result of God’s Love, the Holy Spirit, indwelling in the soul.
- To the soul cut off from God by original sin, Baptism brings sanctifying grace for the first time. Baptism opens the soul to the flow of God’s love, and establishes union between the soul and God.
- To the soul cut off from God by its own sin, by mortal sin, the sacrament of Reconciliation restores the sanctifying grace that has been lost. Reconciliation removes the barrier that has kept the Holy Spirit outside and once again gives entrance to God’s life-giving love.
They deepen and intensify the spiritual life of sanctifying grace which already pulsates through the soul. As each additional sacrament is received (and repeated, when it can be) the level of spiritual vitality rises in the soul...."
If the couple, as they voice their pledges to each other in the words of a sacred rite, and before the community, mean their promises of fidelity to each other and to God, God pours His life, His grace, into this new life they will be building together, into this journey they will be undertaking. They, mind you, marry each other. The priest or deacon doesn't marry them - they are the Church witnesses. And the outward sign or symbol of their sacramental union is flesh, just s flesh is the symbol of the Son of God's union with us, in his Incarnation, and in his Crucifixion.
As a married couple makes love together, passionately, tenderly, the union of their flesh seals the union of their bodies, hearts, minds, and souls. That is what sexual intercourse exists for! The union of our flesh has this incredible power to seal the union of all that we are, all that we can become - together. That's why using sex as a toy, a game, is such a terrible perversion of all the power of uniting two human beings that it holds - the power of God's incandescent, erupting love.
The most amazing truth about faithful, marital love is that God loves the couple through each other. If we truly believe that God lives within us and acts through us, then a husband's tender kisses rain down God's love on his wife, and a wife's intimate caresses rain down God's tender love on her husband. Making love, faithful love, literally makes - creates - more love. And God loves the couple through and in every seemingly ordinary event of their lives together. God loves the wife as her husband takes out the garbage or mows the lawn. God loves the husband as his wife sews a button back on his shirt or makes his favorite cake.
Marriage is the crucible in which we can become all that we are meant to become, and, in doing so, we can set the world ablaze with love. This blaze ignites as children, the fruit of marital love are born. This loving blaze is sometimes invisible, but its potent force for good is undeniable. Ongoing love is the adults, week after week, year after year, washing the family's clothes, making meals, planning family outings, paying the bills, and the children learning the daily disciplines of love, helping with yard work, shoveling snow, taking care of pets....The daily disciplines of family faithful love are the sparks that eventually become a blaze. It's the daily disciplines of faithful love in a family that best graphically expresses for the children what the love of a faithful God is like.
In a culture in which people ridicule the possibility of a faithful and happy marriage, how beautiful and inspiring it is to see an elderly husband remaining by his wife's side as she suffers from dementia, as we see in the movie "The Notebook." Go to any nursing home, and you'll see how real "The Notebook" is - you'll find any number of people visiting their ill spouses on a regular basis. Is this easy? In one sense, never- it is terribly exhausting, traumatic, and painful. Yet, on another level, to be faithful to your spouse in sickness as well as in health is easy, because if you love someone, you cannot imagine doing anything else!
As my husband and I enter into over fifty years of marriage, we cannot imagine life without the other. We have influenced each other, and challenged each other to grow, and inspired each other in more ways than we could ever count. We are each other's half. Even though we have gone through many tragedies together, suffered traumas together, we have experienced God's love most powerfully through each other's faithful love. Yes, faithful married love is possible, do-able, one of the greatest joys and means of fulfillment that God has given the human race. We know it's possible because God loved us first, and continues to love us - faithfully.