A Marriage Revolution

Marriages are imploding all around me. In some cases I could see it coming for years ahead of time. In a few cases, it has been a surprise.

Simultaneously, the airways are filled with chatter and clamor about gay marriage. As a result, I've come to a conclusion.

I want to start a marriage revolution.

The revolution would focus on three essential tenets:

1. Choosing the right person.
2. For the right reason.
3. At the right time.

How much better off would our nation be as a whole, and each of our families individually, if we truly focused on these three things?

What if we started training our children from toddlerhood right up until they are launched?

What if our high schools offered classes in relationship preparedness instead of "sex education"?

What if our churches helped people understand God's plan for spousal union from the pulpit and through formation classes, rather than in a few counseling sessions before the marriage service takes place?

It seems so simple.

Tell me; am I missing something?

A mirror within a mirror...

My friend Laura recently blogged about homosexuality. Between the lines of what she wrote, I sense that she wants to trust in God's Biblically revealed truth about homosexual acts, but has trouble reconciling it with His love.

In thinking about this, it struck me that the pain that two people of the same sex who have fallen in love experience when committed to obeying God's word is the same as our Lord's pain for us.

It is the pain of self denial. The pain of restrained love. The pain of wanting to unleash love and comfort and giving and sharing but having to stop. Having to hold back out of a greater love, out of a greater desire for the best of the beloved. He could simply do it, simply unleash His love on all of us, and in doing so, remove our ability to chose to love Him in return. Instead, he gives us the opportunity to chose love ourselves, mimicking Him by also having to deny ourselves in order to fully accomplish that love.

And so our Lord aches to consummate, throughout the eons.

He must have a very special place set aside for those committed Christians who also ache to consummate with their mirror images, but do not.

Loss or gain?

I was on retreat this past weekend. More on that in other posts.

While driving home with the friend of my heart, we talked about sex.

Over the past months she's been getting brief hints of my Catholic understanding of sexuality, like wisps of the incense she has come to love. Yesterday we waded in a bit more deeply, though there are still more talks to come, more depths to be plumbed.

I explained the basic premise of God's design for sex as having two constitutive elements; it is both unitive and procreative. When either of these elements is missing, sexuality loses it's sacredness. It becomes disordered.

For example, when contracepting, we lose the procreative element and the ramifications are complex and wide reaching. Too broad to cover in this post.

Similarly in homosexuality, the unitive element may be there (and often isn't), but the procreative is also lost.

In the hook up culture, both elements are ditched, and all sacredness and meaning are stripped away, leaving nothing but a biological itch-scratching. Sex becomes very little different than urination or defecation.

(Appalling. But true.)

In thinking back on this conversation with my DiDi this morning, I realized that this is why masturbation is sin. It is neither unitive nor procreative, and so strips our sexuality of sacredness.

It is interesting that we view denial of our sexual urges as a loss, as if in not giving in to temptation, we are losing out. But it occurs to me that it is -in- giving in to these temptations that we suffer loss, because what we give up in those choices is so much bigger. We lose beauty and meaning and power.