Marriage and Relationships: A Commentary on a Commentary

Today's post is a commentary in response to a fascinating discussion that I stumbled upon recently. Father Robert Barron is a phenomenal priest who does amazing work and ministry throughout the world, including a series of YouTube clips in which he comments on pop culture, Catholic teaching, and moral issues. In this particular video, he comments on the idea of marriage by posing a very particular question: Why get married in the Church? What follows is a commentary on the subject that forces the viewer to shift his/her idea of marriage from what he calls a "shared egotism" to a communal and missionary entity.

There are a couple of points on which I would like to expand. The first being the idea of the relationship with a "transcendent third" that must exist in order to prevent a friendship or romantic relationship from devolving into "shared egotism", that is, from becoming so focused on the development of the love between the two, that it shuts out all others and becomes it's own end. In situations such as these, where there is nothing that draws the pair out of themselves , the two must lean completely on each other for growth and support, and this leads to the eventual implosion of a relationship that was not built on something solid to being with. On the other hand, when there exists a transcendent third, relationships are able to grow from a shared foundation and reach for a higher standard. In a way, the transcendent third, which supports the relationship while at the same time going beyond the limitations of the two persons, represents a source and summit from which the couple can both build and reach. It is this striving for God within relationships that strengthens the bond of love and helps it to take root. It also forces the couple to look beyond their own shared experience of love and into the needs of others, allowing the relationship to take on a missionary aspect.

This is why, as Fr. Barron puts is, the love between two people is not a reason to get married within the Church. If two people only wanted to be married because they love one another, they could go to a courthouse or to a drive-through wedding chapel. Marriage is not simply a way to publicly profess mutual love. While this is indeed an essential element, to be married in the Church is to say that God has called the two of you together in order to encourage one another in a relationship with himself, and toward the salvation of you. Not only that, but to get married in the Church professes a commitment to a mutual mission to which both have been called, and neither could complete alone.

This element of mission is even further educated by Paul's exhortation that wives be submissive to their husbands, and that husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church (Ephesians 5:22-25). This widely misunderstood passage simply states that spouses be under the same mission (sub-under, missio-mission), and that they love each other as Christ loved, giving his entire self for the good of his bride.

We can see that the two aspects of the marriage covenant play out inexorably with one another. In order to live out marriage, the two must be under the same mission given to them by God as a unit. At the same time, they must love each other as Christ loves, giving until it hurts, and sacrificing personal good for that of the other. The mission cannot be lived out without sacrificial love, and the love that is given must not be turned inward, but must be focused outward for the good of the couple and of others. Otherwise the mission, and the couple, would devolve and implode.

Marriage is to become a sign of the transcendent God who is at play in every detail. The love of God is not turned inward, but is directed toward the growth and life of his children. The love of God also lives out a mission within a Church to bring peoples to Christ and to bring them into an encounter with the living God. The married couple is meant to model this active and life giving love in order to bring God to the world, and bring the world to God.

So, we must ask ourselves, what is the mission that God wants my marriage (or future marriage) to live out? What is the need in this world that my marriage will fulfill? How will I love my spouse or future spouse and lead them to the God who simultaneously calls us together and calls us to action? As Fr Barron so deftly demonstrates, marriage within the Church brings with it a commission and commitment. The role of all married persons is to live out elements with love and faith in the God who is both foundation and summit.

St Joseph, model of manliness, pray for us

Father, God in heaven, bless us.

Skepticism or Fear?

Today is the feast day of St Thomas the apostle. Thomas, called Didymus or the Twin, is often spoken of in the scriptures. He is most well known for the passage in John read at today's mass (John 20:24-29). The reading goes as follows:

Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples aid to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

 So, for whatever reason, Thomas was absent when Jesus appeared to the apostles the first time (John 20:19-22). Maybe he was out getting food or water. Maybe he was mourning the loss of Jesus who has died three days earlier. Maybe he was just using the ancient Palestinian equivalent of a toilet. Regardless, he returns to hear the other ten apostles proclaiming the good news that Jesus has risen from the dead and shown himself alive. To this, Thomas famously replies, "Unless I see the mark of the nail in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." (John 20:25)

Now, why would Thomas have responded in such a closed off and confrontational manner? Perhaps he is simply a skeptic. Wouldn't you be? The idea of a man, even a man like Jesus, rising from the dead after only three short days is a fantastic story, not to mention crazy. There are countless people today who are skeptical of the same thing.

However, I don't think skepticism is really at play here. Thomas had followed Jesus for three years. He had see the man work miracle after miracle, even going so far as to raise others from the dead. Thomas, like the others, believed the profession of Peter that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matthew 16:13-20; Mark 8:27-30; Luke 9:18-20). No, I think the refusal of Thomas to believe in the resurrection reveals something much deeper: the destruction of hope.

Imagine following Jesus. Imagine believing that he is the Messiah, the one who has come to save Israel from captivity and free them from bondage, both earthly and spiritual. Imagine putting all of your hope, all of your faith, and all of your expectation into this man who can walk on water, raise the dead, and drive out demons with a word. Now, imagine watching this man be savagely beaten, spit upon, whipped, and made to carry the instrument of his own execution. Imagine what it must feel like to watch him be nailed naked to a cross in full view of the people he professed to save. Imagine the heartbreak that Thomas must have felt, not just for Jesus, his dear friend and mentor, but for himself and every other person who put faith in this poor rabbi who was made to die a criminal's death. In a way, Jesus was not the only one to die that day. All of the hopes, dreams, and faith of the people who followed him, including Thomas, had been nailed on that cross alongside Jesus. Thomas' hope was killed as well that day, and it must have been agony.

Now, fast forward three days. The eleven are hiding, scared to suffer Jesus' fate.The terrible memory and deep anguish of a hope demolished were still fresh in Thomas' heart. Then, after a short time away, Thomas returns to hear that Jesus is alive! This was not only too good to be true, it was too good to be believable. It was too good to be taken seriously. To a man who had not had the time to even begin rebuilding his faith and hope in God, this must have come as just another slap to the face. So, in anger and frustration at nobody in particular, Thomas makes his proclamation that he will not believe unless he has seen and touched the man himself. He cannot believe. He cannot open his heart to have faith, especially after it had been so hurt the last time he had believed in anything.

Thus, the gospel reveals to us, through the person of Thomas, a kind of mirror into our own experience of vulnerability, suffering, and the feeling of betrayal. Thomas, though offered a way out of his misery and self-devouring heartbreak, opts to remain in the belief that Jesus is dead. Why would he do that? Simply put, Thomas, like the rest of us at some time or another, has been fooled by the enemy into accepting and dwelling in suffering as a way of avoiding the new and unknown. Even though consolation is offered to him, the Devil uses the feelings of betrayal and loss in order to make Thomas avoid vulnerability, and in turn, reject love. We, like Thomas, tend to accept the suffering we know in order to avoid or put off the joy that we don't. Thomas' reaction to the news of the resurrection reveals to us our own fear of heartbreak that manifests itself in a lack of openness and vulnerability.

In his pain, the enemy convinces Thomas that to believe in anything is to suffer, and suffering is to be avoided. So Thomas puts a condition on his belief: He must touch and feel the risen Lord, and then his heart will begin to accept the invitation of consolation.

And it is important that Thomas asks for something tangible. He needs to experience the fullness of Jesus resurrected to have his heart healed. The simple news of it will not due. Is this not true in our own world as well? The news of Jesus is good, but without the fullness of an experience, the Gospel is just a collection of stories and the scriptures just another book. Thomas, like many of us in a hurting and broken world, need to experience Jesus with all of our senses to make up for the hurt and demoralization we feel.

So Jesus comes, and the first thing he says is to Thomas. "Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe." (John 20:27). I imagine that Jesus, knowing full-well the depth of the heartbreak that Thomas felt, must have looked upon him with love and care. "Come", his eyes must have said, "and have your hope restored." And how does Thomas react to this? He cries out, with tears in his eyes and renewed faith in his soul, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). His experience allows him to believe again in the hope of the Messiah. In a way, Thomas' belief was also raised from the dead on Easter Sunday.

Jesus ends this passage by teaching Thomas by his experience. "Jesus said to him [Tomas], 'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed'" (John 20:29). Jesus tells us that the more blessed faith is that which does not falter in the face of adversity. True faith does not shrink under hardship or wither under pressure. True faith goes beyond the sensual experience of life and penetrates deep into our very being, changing us, strengthening us.

May we all pray for this blessing as the Israelite man did in Mark 9:24, "I believe, help my unbelief!" Let us pray for the faith the size of a mustard seed that changes us and allows us to move mountains, and let us recognize the blessing that Jesus tells us it truly is in today's gospel. But let us also understand the smallness of our own faith, and let us run to Jesus in the Eucharist. Let us fully experience him with all of our senses as Thomas did, and let that experience reveal to us a deeper faith and allow us to truly hope in things that are yet intangible and yet unseen.

St Thomas, Pray for us,
St Jospeh, model of manliness, pray for us
Father in heaven, bless us

Tragic Misappropriation

I think we all want to think of ourselves as smart, don't we? It's not that we just want to hold a conversation or gain the admiration of other people. While all of that is nice, and even useful or pleasant, humanity seeks knowledge in an effort to grasp that which is bigger than ourselves. We seek to wrap our minds around complex realities that fascinate and amaze us, not simply because we want to amuse or educate ourselves, but because central to our personhood is an orientation to the greater, more transcendent, elements of life which go beyond our simple senses and lead us to the conclusion that we cannot be made for a limited time or space.

The very fact that we can see and conceptualize something beyond what we see and feel separates us from the rest of the created world. No matter how smart your dog may be, or how many signs you teach Koko the gorilla, they will never be able have faith or hope in anything because they have no sense of it. They are merely mortal creation, bound to the limits of their sensory world.

Sad right? NO! This is order! This is natural hierarchy! This is the nature of all creation pointing to us and past us as we stand on the pinnacle of what can be held, and look beyond us to a world that can only be known by revelation and meditation. It can be pondered and expounded upon, and our knowledge of it can be transposed by those gifted by God with the depth of intellect needed to pare such transcendent realities into something that can be understood and studied.

It is with these minds pondering all manner of science and philosophy that we come to understand who we are and how we were made, both physically and spiritually, and we gain an understanding of how we are to relate to one another and how we are to relate to that singular infinite greatness that stands above us and reaches out to us. This is how we come to study philosophy, theology, sociology, history, biology, and all other manner of sciences that are meant to pull our experiential and spiritual knowledge together and bring us into greater awe and devotion to the one who made it all.

However, what happens when God is ignored? What happens when the gift of intellect is given yet misdirected. What happens when the hierarchy of nature is disregarded, or worse, what if those gifted and eloquent minds take the pointing of nature to indicate finality and climax in the human person, and a philosophical glass ceiling is placed on the investigation of who we are?

Neichze: Thinking as crazy as his mustache

In a western world where we do not want for anything material, and are slowly ridding ourselves of any true connection or relationship of self-giving love, we are leaving our minds and hearts open and able to hit the limits of sensual experience and turn back inward upon ourselves. All of a sudden, the wants and desires of our hearts and minds, the only things that remain even partially transcendent, become gods of our making that demand worship.

All of a sudden, those minds who were gifted to grasp and verbalize the transcendent mysteries are given the place of priest and prophet within the secular religion, and they are tasked to look at the disorder of life and explain it away. Whether we are talking of sexual immorality, loss of identity, or simply the habitual sin experienced and perpetrated by countless souls on a daily basis, the task of the thinker is to make it okay.

So, as a result, we have theories and philosophies that could fill thousands of volumes. However, all lead to the same end: Everything is moral, and every new depravity can be chalked up to social phenomena or societal evolution. All this because the God and Father if all, who made all thing to point beyond humanity to a place that fulfills all desire, is removed, and all that was made to point to eternity become an ends in themselves. Philosophical and social scientific thought is done for its own sake, leaving us with a culture that continually practices a form of intellectual masturbation.


And who are the casualties of such a system? Simply put, the students. Those disciples of the secular prophets who are subject day after day to the thought of other lost souls cannot help but to drown in what they are served. The result are artists and thinkers who spit out the same misguided ideas of humanity and our "purpose" under the guise of free thought and enlightenment. All the while, they dig deeper and deeper inward upon their own hearts and minds, trying to find meaning that remains behind them, beyond that glass ceiling and into eternity.

At the end of the day, we cannot look at our world without first understanding and realizing that there is a loving Creator who built all things in order to bring us closer to him. He is not doing so to achieve some sort of vain glory. On the contrary, he has laid the path before us to walk into eternity. He has come down, incarnate, to bridge the gaps and set us free from the ropes of relativism and sin that bind us to our senses. We must take a step beyond what we see and know, and allow ourselves to be caught up into a person that is ever ancient, yet ever new.

Saint Joseph, pray for us
Father, God in heaven, bless us

A Beautiful Day. A Beautiful Beginning.

We love weddings here in America. We really do. And why not? Weddings are awesome! Your friends and family are happy, everyone loves each other for a day, the food is good, there's dancing, and you get a big fat slice of gourmet cake. There is almost no downside! The Church loves weddings too. Two people coming together freely for the sole purpose of giving of themselves as a gift to the other. The wedding marks the beginning a new chapter in the life of the bride and groom, but also in the life of all their family and friends who have assembled to celebrate this occasion with them.

This wedding fever expands far beyond the ceremony itself. We have shows like The Bachelor, Say Yes to the Dress, Bridezillas, Amazing Wedding Cakes, and all other manner of shows that track every aspect of the wedding from the couple's first meeting to the alter and reception. Wedding episodes of other shows end up being the highest rated episodes of the series. Even the stories we tell our kids end up with a couple getting married and living "happily ever after". If you still don't believe me, just look at the cost of every aspect of the wedding, from the dress, to the cake, to the hall, to the music, and the prices that people are willing to pay to put on the perfect ceremony and reception.

There is not doubt that we are obsessed. We are trained to dream of "that special day" from the time that we notice the opposite sex. But at the same time, the divorce rate still hovers around 51% percent in the United States. How can this be? How can a culture that is so in love with weddings be so volatile for marriages? On the flip side, why put so much money and so much dreaming into a wedding that only has a 1 in 2 chance of working out.

The answer is simple: In a culture where 51% of marriages fail, we insist on the perfect wedding in order to ensure that we can at least hold on to one perfect memory.

We're talking about a culture of fear. Marriages are not emphasized or glorified. They are not though of as sacred or holy. The gift of self is thought of as more of a business exchange than a self-giving. We even have pre-nuptial agreements, legal contracts, predicated on the assumption that marriages will end. Is it any shock then that we look forward to weddings instead of marriages? If you are truly afraid of being hurt, why wouldn't you put as much effort as possible into making sure that the one day you control turns out perfectly? The fear of divorce and the cultural wedding obsession have become a self-fulfilling prophecy in which weddings grow and become more extravagant while more and more marriages suffer and die.

Now, I do not think bad thing to love weddings. It is an awesome thing to look forward to taking those vows and celebrating that unity. A couple should look forward to their wedding day in the same way that a seminarian looks forward to his holy orders and a novice sister looks forward to the day she takes her final vows. I am simply saying that we need a shift. 

Stop thinking of a wedding of an end instead of a beginning. A man and a woman are entering into one life and one love together. Use the wedding as a way to look forward. Dream about your future spouse and the life that you can build together. Truly think and pray about the lengths you will go to love your spouse and give of yourself to ensure their happiness and their good. Marriages are supposed to be so strong that only death can part the two. We need to enter marriages with the mindset that we will stay together forever, and we will work to ensure that we do not fail.

 We limit ourselves when we simply get caught up in wedding fever and dream only of the wedding day. The wedding is the start of a sacramental life shared by two people. That is something that is far more exciting than the day it all begins.

St. Joseph, model of mahood, pray for us

Father in heaven, bless us.

What Now...?

Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Lord of the Universe, is dead and laid in the tomb. Imagine that you are one of his disciples. Yesterday Jesus was beaten, scorned, insulted, gored, and hung on a cross to die naked in front a crowd of those who hated him and celebrated his demise. And what did you do? Maybe you ran. Maybe you hid. Were you afraid for your own life? Did you think, maybe they would do the same to you if they found you? How do you feel today, Saturday? What do you do when the man you gave everything for is gone?

Scripture doesn't really tell us much about what the apostles did on Holy Saturday. We know from Luke (23:56) that they rested according to the Sabbath. Did they go to the temple? If they did, they must have tried to remain inconspicuous. The voice of Jesus must have still been ringing in their ears when he said, "No slave is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you... they will do these things to you on account of my name" (John 15:20-21).

The Apostles together on Holy Saturday

They must have felt lost. They must have thought to themselves, "what now?". Maybe the words of Peter came to mind. "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." (John 6:68). Imagine the quiet emptiness that they must have felt. Imagine the feelings of abandonment. Imagine what it must have felt like to give three years of your life to a man and his cause, only to see him die. Not only that, but to know that you just ran away; to know that you valued your own life so much that you weren't even there to comfort him. I'm sure that Peter is not the only one who denied knowing Jesus that day.

We do know some things, however. We know that they returned to the upper room and stayed together. Indeed, on Easter Sunday, Jesus finds them there together (Jn 20: 19, 26). They were supporting and consoling each other. They must have been praying for a next step. We know that Mary of Magdala was there. When they saw Jesus, it says they returned to the upper room to tell the apostles (Jn 20:1-2; Mt 27:7-8; Mk 16:7; Lk 24: 7-8).

We can also assume that Mary was with them. John took her into his home (Jn 19:27), and as they were all together, she must have been there too. Imagine the comfort she must have been to them. She had a faith that surpassed all of them. She knew from the moment she gave her 'yes' to the angel (Lk 1:38), and from her encounter with Simeon in the temple those many years before (Lk 2:34-35), that this day was coming. She was their mother now (Jn 19:26). Yes, she was mourning  Yes, she must have been in more pain then any of them, but she knew that her son would come through. She believed.

Mary the Comforter

So, on this day of quiet contemplation, on this day of quiet desolation as our Lord rests in the tomb, I encourage you to be seek comfort in the arms of Mary, our mother. She is a model of faith. She is a model of patient perseverance. As we entered the tomb with Christ last night and stay there today, ask Mary to pray for you. Ask her to dry your tears and lead your prayers. Let yourself be buried in her embrace and allow her to bring you deeper into the Paschal Mystery. That way, when the bells ring tonight at the first Easter mass of the year, we can truly experience the joy of the Risen Lord as Mary and the apostles do.

Mary, mother of the Church, pray for us
God, Father in Heaven, bless us