Love As God Loves

Dear Parishioners,

It is not uncommon for someone who was raised in a strict household to rebel some… either as a teen or young adult. After we have done our share of willfully ignoring the wisdom of our elders, we might look back and wish we could have spared ourselves the wreckage we inflicted upon ourselves. We may have learned that their boundaries were for our well-being. This is the context in which today’s Gospel should be received. Instead of looking at them as just rules to restrict our freedom. Hear these precepts in a new way.

The original precepts or laws of God to Moses were intended to be written on their hearts. But because of the hardness of their hearts, they continued to sin and ignore God’s plan for them. Thankfully, when the time was right, God sent Jesus to us, not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it so that our hearts would soar, our friendships flourish, and our love of God be more passionate. Jesus revealed that God did not want simple behavior compliance, but rather that we would have an interior transformation, so that we would live by the Spirit which would exceed the mandates of the law. Imagine a marriage that was simply about behavior compliance. That sounds more like forced slavery to me.

This weekend we celebrated National Marriage Week. In this covenant of love, husbands and wives strive to live out the promise to love as God loves in a particular way by giving of each other without condition. Anyone who is married knows that the Sacrament isn’t about rules, yet without the boundaries that cradle the awesome covenant we call matrimony, it would decay from the inside out. I think it is safe to say that on their wedding day, most couples have hope that their marriage would bring a lifetime of love and intimacy.

So the call for marriage is to imitate God’s love by dedicating oneself to service for their spouse and be open to the children conceived from their love. In other words, their vocation is to love as God loves. Through the highs and lows, the ecstasies and crucibles of marriage, each spouse’s vocation is to help the other become more of what God desires for them. More than ever today, we need to lift up couples and this divine institution, that’s right, an institution created by God and not us.

Among many of the aspects of marital love, the conjugal relationship of marriage holds within it one of the greatest “super powers” we humans have, and that is to co-create life with God. Pope John Paul II in his monumental teaching on marriage, now called the Theology of the Body, spoke about this aspect of marital union as a way to touch heaven. The passion of love in the “marital embrace,” as he describes it, touches the divine. And if we think about it, our lives are made for infinity-for ecstasy, and our hearts know it.

Pope Benedict XVI in his first Encyclical, “God is Love,” shared that we are an integral person, body and soul, and that when our bodies love through an undisciplined eros (think erotic love without boundaries), we we degrade ourselves. But when it is disciplined (again think ordered or given boundaries), it can provided “not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” Our being already yearns for heaven whether we know it or not. We were made for heaven. And the perfections of married life are intended to point us to heaven, where the Blessed Trinity, a communion of love, resides.

So, I want to encourage and thank all of our married couples for their daily example of sacrificial and passionate love you show to your spouse. Such a commitment encourages the rest of us who are not married to be faithful to our own vocations. I also want to let those who have broken marriages or marriages that have grown distant or worse, harmful, that you are not a failure. God’s love for you has not been lessened. His mercies are renewed each morning. In fact, our Lord has a special care for you who suffer in their marriage. And for those of you who are widows or widowers,  it is clear throughout the whole of the Scriptures that God has compassion for you.