October 4, 2009 Cycle B
Genesis 2:18-24 Hebrews 2:9-11 Mark 10:2-12 (Shorter)
Years ago a young man was courting a wise woman. The young man proclaimed, “I love you!”
The woman asked, “Do you?” He insisted, “I love you deeply.”
Then, she paused for a moment. She then asked her earnest suitor, “Tell me, do you know what gives me pain? What hurts me? What makes me sad?”
The young man was taken aback by her question, he stammered that he did not, nor could he possibly know what hurt her. “I am trying to tell you how much you mean to me, and you ask meaningless questions!”
The woman said quietly, but firmly, “The question is not meaningless, for if you do not know what hurts me, how can you possibly say that you love me?”
The question is not a frivolous one, only with an understanding of grief and disappointments of those we love, can we love as Christ loves us.
The opening reading today from the Book of Genesis speaks about that sense of loneliness and longing of Adam. Here he was living in the “garden of paradise,” but all that beauty did not matter. When he was given a suitable partner, a loving companion, all the beauty of creation did not matter. Adam’s loneliness was absorbed in loving another person. Someone from his own flesh, someone so close to him that they were like one flesh.
Today the Scriptures set before us a high ideal, especially for those of you who have taken on the vocation of marriage.
In the past forty years the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As one sociologist, Andrew Cherlin, observed in a new book called “The Marriage Go Round.” What is significant about contemporary American families compared with those of other nations, is their combination of “frequent marriage,” “frequent divorce,” and the high number of “short term cohabiting relationships.” Taken together these forces “create a great turbulence in American family life. A coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans, than the lives of people of any other Western Country,” so he writes.
Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner --- this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life. However, the numbers unfortunately are moving in a different direction and they continue to rise. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported this past May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.
Does any of this matter? Oh, I think it does! There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship, and human misery in this country, as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mother’s financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least, namely “the nations underclass.”
The vocation of marriage, like all vocations, is a call to be self-sacrificing, self-giving, other directed. When that commitment of self-transcendence is expressed in vows before a minister of the Church, we call it the Sacrament of Marriage. Those vows strengthened by the Grace of the Sacrament, makes self-transcendence possible. When consent is given and vows expressed, the marriage couple starts out on the long path to becoming “one flesh” again.
Now this value we hold for the Sacrament of Marriage belies what individualism we find in our American society today. A wedding is about the couple’s public entrance into the civic and often religious rituals of the society. Its emotional strength comes from long continuity, knowing that they are repeating the steps of those who have preceded them, and those who will follow.
I speak of the fact of a communal responsibility, of being part of a wider picture. That our actions, no matter how private, always resonate in the public square. Unfortunately this is beyond where most people are today. Many have been too trained to “join an army of one” – “all about me, all about individualism.” This mentality is something that we need to continue to work on with our children and grandchildren. To help them understand the value of a Catholic wedding. To understand the value of having your marriage blessed within the Catholic Church. It is an opportunity to see, and live out, this teaching that we find in our Scriptures today, for the fruit of marriage is found not only in children, but also in a renewed relationship with God. If the vows are broken, the journey to God is also disrupted, though certainly not ended.
This understanding of marriage is the pathway for returning to God. It can give us new insight in to the words of Jesus in our Gospel today. If we are able to discover in the vocation of marriage an invitation to grow in consciousness of God through the faithful living out of your vows, then Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is not just another hard saying. Rather it is instead an invitation to strive always for self-transcendence. Along that path lies the way of a happy marriage and the return to the contentment of Adam and Eve.
Amen. Amen. Msgr. Tom, Pastor, Christ the King