Let's Talk About Marriage

The Book of Genesis shows that man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God; in receiving and accepting each other, they recognize that they are made for each other (cf. Gen 1:24-31; 2:4b-25). Through procreation, man and woman collaborate with God in accepting and transmitting life: “By transmitting human life to their descendants, man and woman as spouses and parents co-operate in a unique way in the Creator's work.” (CCC, 372).

Their responsibility also involves the stewardship of creation and the propagation of the human family. In biblical tradition, the beauty of human love as mirroring divine love is developed mainly in the Song of Songs and the prophets.

The Church’s proclamation on the family finds its foundation in the life and preaching of Jesus, who lived and grew up in the family of Nazareth. He attended the wedding at Cana, which he honored by performing the first of his “signs” (cf. Jn 2:1-11) and presented himself as the Bridegroom who unites himself to his Bride (cf. Jn 3:29).

On the cross, he gave himself up with a love to the very end and, in his resurrected body, established new relationships among people. By revealing the fullness of divine mercy, Jesus allows man and woman to recover that “principle” according to which God unites them in one flesh (cf. Mt 19:4-6) and for which — by the grace of Christ — they are enabled to be faithful to each other and love each other forever.

Therefore, the divine measure of conjugal love, to which spouses are called by grace, has its source in “the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead” (EG, 36), the very heart of the Gospel.

Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod on the Family, 1-2

Reflection – Well, the time has come at last for the long awaited, unfortunately much hyped and spun, and in some quarters much dreaded Synod on the Family in Rome. I thought I would take some time on the blog the next while to blog little bits and pieces of the study document, the Instrumentum Laboris, that the bishops of the Church are using as a starting point for their discussions.

I didn’t blog yesterday because I was at a wedding, actually, and didn’t have internet access. One of the guests at the wedding asked me if I was nervous about the synod and what changes the bishops might make about the Church’s teachings on marriage and sex and the moral demands around these.

My basic response was a wonderful expression I learned this summer and which I have no shortage of opportunities to use. ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys!’ In other words, the real things that are actually happening in my life and in the  lives of the real people who really come to me for counsel and help are more than enough for every bit of energy and concern and whatever store of worry I may have to spend. Everything else is someone else’s monkeys, as far as I am concerned.

Prayer, yes—for everyone, for the Church and the world. But worry? Ain’t got time for that nonsense. Also, so far almost everything has been media speculation (which has proven, time and time and time again, to be idiotic and utterly and simply wrong—these people just don’t know what they’re talking about), and this or that individual bishop expressing his opinion (unwisely and uncharitably in my opinion, as it feeds the speculation of the ignorant and sensationalistic media, and generates expectations that are bound to be disappointed). But nothing real has happened, yet, and so let’s not waste time worrying about, literally, nothing.

Meanwhile, the study document is quite good and careful, as such things should be. We see here that the first paragraphs lay out the Scriptural meaning of marriage as the expression of creation’s goodness, man’s cooperation in this work of God, and how this nuptial cooperation is taken up into and made an expression of God’s love for humanity which is brought to perfection in Christ. Deep stuff, and worth not just reading but meditating upon. Everything else we must say about marriage has to start there and flow from there, or it is wrong-headed from the beginning.

It is a divine reality in a very human package indeed—messy, fraught with difficulties, demanding much generosity and trust and truly heroic love from those who enter into it. Yet that is what God has revealed to us, and that is the kind of life He calls married couples into. Let us pray that the Synod fathers will begin, continue, and conclude all their discussions from and with this contemplation of the divine meaning, presence, and action within the human person, seen nowhere more deeply than in the vocation of marriage and family life.

The Tightrope Walker's (Inter)Net

Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive.  Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.

This repudiation of silence is a factor of human guilt, and the melancholy in the world is the outward expression of that guilt. Language is surrounded by the dark rim of melancholy, no longer by the rim of silence.

Silence is present in language, therefore, even after language has arisen out of silence. The world of language is built over and above the world of silence. Language can only enjoy security as it moves about freely in words and ideas in so far as the broad world of silence is stretched out below. From the breadth of silence language learns to achieve its own breadth. Silence is for language what the net stretched out taut below him is for the tightrope walker.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I wanted to return to this book, which I had blogged about a while back. This really flows out of yesterday’s post, in which I decried the level of anger and vitriol in so much of our public discourse today, and particularly in the discourse that occurs online, even among Catholics and other Christians who really should know better.

Yesterday I didn’t want to just add my angry voice to the din, so connected all of this to Teresa of Avila’s famous prayer ‘Let nothing disturb thee.’ I believe that the degrading of our public discourse into polarized anger and name calling, etc., bespeaks of a loss of interiority, a spiritual malady that ultimately has little to do with the issues of the day and more to do with a loss of what is to be our true focus and priority—God and our communion with Him.

Picard speaks here of this, masterfully linking the degradation of speech and discourse to the loss of silence. His words here are so clear that I hardly know what to add to them (the whole book is like that – luminous thoughts flowing one after the other like a clear stream of insight and truth).

Silence as the ‘net’ of tightrope walking language, words becoming harsh and aggressive when they only come from other words, the loneliness of words that do not come out of silence, the melancholy of the world that is full of such words.

We really do have to take this to heart—his insights ring so very true, and the decades since he wrote this book have only amplified and confirmed the truth of his insights.

So, silence. Where is silence in our lives? Do we find it; can we? We all know there are people in situations where silence is not going to happen much. Mothers with lots of small children are not going to have too many silent moments. But even there—I always think of a friend of mine, homeschooling mother of a large brood, who would have a ‘silent reading’ period in her daily curriculum. The older kids had their books, the  little ones would look at picture books or color, the baby would (hopefully) be napping, and silence would reign for a period in this large and normally noisy Catholic family.

In other words… it’s possible. And for those of us not surrounded by toddlers, it is certainly possible to carve out spaces for silence in our days. We just have to want to do it, and make the necessary arrangements. We can indeed decide to surround our language and our noise with the great rim of silence, and even in our busyness to cultivate inner silence, a interior disposition of listening and receptivity, non-judgment and contemplation. 

This is that ‘disciple’s tongue, so that I may know how to respond to the weary’ that Isaiah 50 writes of. Language born in the womb of silence, language that comes only slowly and with great care from a deep well of repose—ultimately, from this whole business of ‘Let nothing disturb thee… all things are passing… God never changes’ that Teresa of Avila wrote of.

We really do need this, more and more urgently all the time. When Catherine Doherty began to establish poustinias in the 1960s she was truly prophetic, seeing that the lack of silence was in fact the deepest poverty of all in our affluent society. And her final book—literally her last word in a lifetime filled with words and language—was on the silence of God as the wellspring of all words and all love.

So there we are—what else is there to say? Without silence, listening, peace of spirit, our words are clamorous, empty, vain, angry, and ultimately fruitless. And if we truly are lacking that inner peace, perhaps it is better for us to remain silent rather than crowd the world with our fruitless speech.

Let Nothing Disturb Thee

Let nothing disturb thee,

Let nothing affright thee.

All things are passing,

God never changes.

Patient endurance

Attains all things.

Who possesses God

Wants for nothing.

God alone suffices.

St Teresa of Avila

Reflection – Yesterday’s post about Therese of Lisieux has put me in a Carmelite frame of mind, and so I woke up this morning with this prayer by Teresa of Avila on my mind. It is one I often revert to; I wrote a simple musical setting for it that we do from time to time here at Mass, and it is a prayer that has thus slipped into the collective consciousness of our community.

I have been concerned for some time about the degree of ‘disturbance’ in people these days. I do not live under a rock; I do know, quite well, what is happening in the world, and pay close attention to it, as best one can. There is great violence loose in the world, a spirit of war, as one of my wise brother priests puts it here.

In the face of great evil—beheadings and the like—and of all the lesser evils we encounter as a matter of course (corrupt venal politicians, weak or worldly leaders in the Church, and other sundry nonsense), the great tendency many of us have is to Get Mad, and in that to Get Loud.

The Internet has been the great accelerant of anger and volume in our day, of course. Every one of us who has access to technology has a giant megaphone with which we can trumpet whatever is coming out of our hearts and minds. In the past, only the words of the great and powerful could extend beyond the immediate earshot of the speaker; now, these very words I am typing will be read by someone in India in less than an hour’s time (hi, you know who!).

What this means for all of us is a great responsibility. ‘To whom much has been given, much will be expected.’ If I have been ‘given’ (in the sense that I certainly didn’t invent it), the ability to instantly communicate a message to the entire world, and if I in fact know that by the end of the day a couple hundred people anyhow will have read my writings, then I have to be very careful in choosing my words.

Those who have greater readerships, have greater responsibility yet. And this is where I personally am very concerned—there is just so much anger, so much vitriol, so much name-calling and seething contempt out there. And… I’m talking about the ‘Catholic’ blogosphere here, folks.

There is so much anger and hatred and fierce contempt and violence in the world. Do we really need to pour out from our hearts our own bile and venom and disdain? How does this serve the cause of Christ and the life of the Body of Christ, the Church?

‘Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing affright thee. All things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance attains all things. Who possesses God wants for nothing. God alone suffices.’ Surely this is to be the starting point for every Christian engagement in the world, isn’t it? And out of this, we can find the right words to talk about Islamic terror, police brutality, the genuinely debased and diseased nature of politics in our countries, the rampaging agendas that threaten religious and civil freedoms, and so forth.

We do have to speak about these matters, and I have, to some degree, done so on this blog. But we have to speak with mercy, with patience, with respect for those who genuinely disagree with us, with respect for the basic human dignity and God-created goodness of those who we believe to be behaving wrongly.

We must never seethe with dripping contempt and vituperous abuse and insult, name-calling and blackguarding and ranting against how very, very lousy… everyone else is.

I, Fr. Denis Lemieux, am a sinner. I am lousy. Who am I to denounce the sin of my brother or sister? But with patient endurance I wait—we all wait—on the God who never changes, and hope to possess Him, and so want nothing. And so it must be in the Christian engagement with evil in the world, or we are just one more angry, violent voice doing nothing to make anything better, and doing quite a bit to make things a lot worse.

Lots of people can spew anger into the internet. We who are Christians are the only ones who can proclaim Christ into the internet. If we don’t, nobody will, and the world will be an angrier, colder, more polarized and hate-filled place. And we will not have to look far to know who is responsible for that.

Let nothing disturb thee. Patient endurance attains all things. God alone suffices.

The Church Has a Heart

Since my longing for martyrdom was powerful and unsettling, I turned to the epistles of St Paul in the hope of finally finding an answer. By chance the 12th and 13th chapters of the 1st epistle to the Corinthians caught my attention, and in the first section I read that not everyone can be an apostle, prophet or teacher, that the Church is composed of a variety of members, and that the eye cannot be the hand. Even with such an answer revealed before me, I was not satisfied and did not find peace.

I persevered in the reading and did not let my mind wander until I found this encouraging theme: Set your desires on the greater gifts. And I will show you the way which surpasses all others. For the Apostle insists that the greater gifts are nothing at all without love and that this same love is surely the best path leading directly to God. At length I had found peace of mind.

When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the members which St Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favorably within the whole body.

Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more.

I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is everlasting.

Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling: my call is love. Certainly I have found my place in the Church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction.

St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

Reflection – Today is the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. I have written about her before on the blog; she is really my favorite saint, the first saint who I got to know as a person, and a constant spiritual guide and help for me, as she is for many millions of people.

It never fails to amaze me, that God would pluck someone whose life was so utterly obscure, so thoroughly ordinary in its external details, and elevate her to the status of one of the most well known and well beloved saints of the Church. There is a prophetic quality to this story—Therese stands at the very dawn of the 20^th century and presents to us something vitally important about sanctity and the ways of God among men. It is a point of some irony, perhaps, that the vision of sanctity she presents is one especially suitable to the age of the laity in the Church, given that she herself is a consecrated Carmelite nun.

What is this vision? It’s more or less what she presents here, although she says it in different ways in her book. Namely, that it is great love that makes a saint, not great deeds. The vision of sanctity that excusably might emerge from the study of many of the canonized saints of the Church is that of a sort of spiritual Olympics—higher, faster, stronger—filled with people who shed their blood for Christ, founded orders, wrote great works of theology, performed prodigies of service to the poor, traveled to mission lands. Sanctity then, is limited to people of unusual gifts and strengths, or who find themselves in situations allowing for extremities like dying a martyr’s death (me, I’d like to die for Christ, but nobody has shown up who’s willing to kill me just yet!).

Therese, then, corrects this sort of spiritual elitism, by showing us that it is not deeds but love, not extraordinary events but extraordinary faithfulness in whatever events are ours, not prodigies of intellect or body, but a will wholly set on doing everything that is pleasing to God in the real circumstances of our real lives.

And this, then, opens the path to holiness for everyone no matter what. It is both a consoling vision, and a very challenging one. God does not demand what we cannot do—that our lives and our persons be other than what they are, before He can make us a great saint. Instead He asks that we live the lives we are living today, no matter what they consist of, with such love and fidelity, such prayer and devotion, that He can make us into a flame of love right here and right now. And this is the life of the Church, and the life of the world, that which makes everything luminous and joyous and beautiful.

And that is what St. Therese of Lisieux came to teach us.