The essentials of Catholic teaching on life and love, in 2000 words.
By Pat Gohn October 24, 2012
The Year of Faith has been my theme here for weeks, but today, I'm talking about my years of faith, together with one man: My husband of thirty years, Bob.
What about Bob? We met in high school. Bob became a loyal and faithful friend. We did not date in high school, but I remember his counsel after my then-boyfriend broke up with me in a rather humiliating fashion. Bob told me that guy was not good enough for me, that I deserved better. He said it in a respectful way that didn't ridicule me for making a foolish choice or that didn't put down the other guy. But his concern for me touched my heart.
Bob and I were guitar buddies, a duo always strumming, and singing. But we had more than music in common.
We both had faith in Jesus. We took different paths to get there, but we both had church-going parents who sent us to Catholic schools, and taught us to serve our respective communities. So that's where our friendship grew—at school, and through many church-sponsored ministries that needed our musicianship.
We also found each other at morning Mass. We learned to pray for each other and with each other outside of Mass too.
The other night we were reminiscing about our courtship during our college years. Before us sat a box of cards and letters from those days. We flipped through our wedding photo as we listened to a scratchy sounding old cassette tape. Someone—at the last minute—brought a tape recorder to our wedding Mass. Who knew that person would bless us thirty years later—or that the technology would somehow still hold up?
People ask what makes our love special, or what "works" for us, and we tell them: long before we fell in love with each other, we fell in love with Jesus. There's an old proverb in Scripture that says, "A threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Eccl. 4:12). Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote a whole book on the subject, arguing that it takes three to get married, and we believe it.
We have faith in God, and faith in each other. When we said our marriage vows in the church that crisp fall morning in 1982, we knew we would vow for life . . . and that what we lacked in our own strength would be made up for by grace.
Talk to any Catholic couple married for a few decades or more and the subject of grace is bound to come up. They may not always use the word itself. It might be their reference to "God only knows" or an indescribable or halting acknowledgement of something that is bigger and grander than they are. But what they will say next is also true: that this love has changed them, made them better, even transformed them.
There is a glue that is stronger than our human love—it is divine grace. Sometimes we think it is just because we were fortunate enough to marry someone better than ourselves—that we lucked out—or discovered someone who believes the best in us despite our frailties, a soul mate. But what we're really seeing is the truth of the matter: the radiant beauty of God is in our spouse. God magnifies their best human qualities, attracts us to them, and then He give us the privilege of knowing His Love through them. And yes, I'm here to say, in all honestly, that the profound gift of God's Love made visible in my life, today, has a few wrinkles, some gray, and a few extra pounds.
Just in case you think I'm offering some kind of romanticized view of the love of God and the love between married couples, let me also say that there is a side of grace that is gritty, tough, and sturdy under fire. This is the power of the vow; the grace and mercy that flows from the choice—the consent—of the lovers. When we think we cannot hold on any longer, the power of the vow keeps us true.
Consent in the context of the Sacrament of Matrimony is the heart of marriage. Being married in the Catholic Church requires living a vowed life. This consent is the full, no-holds-barred, generous gift of singular self-donation that unleashes the power to say "yes" to one another over and over again. It is a free-will gift, a choice that decides, in advance, that come what may, "I choose you. Again." It is so powerful that no Catholic marriage is valid without this fearless, informed consent. There is no substitute for it.
The Church holds the exchange of consent between the spouses to be the indispensable element that "makes the marriage." If consent is lacking there is no marriage.
The consent consists in a "human act by which the partners mutually give themselves to each other": "I take you to be my wife"—"I take you to be my husband." This consent that binds the spouses to each other finds its fulfillment in the two "becoming one flesh." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1626-1627)
That the two lovers become one flesh is the fulfillment of church teachings on consent. It is, for us, a good and holy thing. Do I still think that after thirty years? Did you read the paragraphs about grace and how attractive love is? Let me indulge you a little bit more.
Recently I was chatting with some young single people about chastity, and the grace-fueled integrity it takes to refrain from sexual intercourse, and all its intimate foreplays, before marriage.
If you want the real deal—a faith-filled, committed marriage for life—you're going to need the trust that comes from sexual integrity that is borne of prayer and graces from the sacraments. It also comes from a spirit of self-sacrifice and self-denial on behalf of the future beloved, cultivating an attitude that another's good is more precious than your own. Developing that side of your relationship before your marriage will pay dividends after your wedding day. (Let it also be said that even couples that have erred in this area, can renew their sexual integrity through the graces of confession and the Eucharist, and grow in sacrificial love for one another as they prepare for marriage. We all need graces to strengthen our love!)
Chastity is not about being against sexual love, it's about being for sexual love, but more concretely, it is being for the dignity of the other person. Chastity means one thing before marriage, and another thing after marriage.
Chastity, practiced as a virtue before marriage, honors you as it honors someone's future wife or husband, who eventually may be your future mate. Chastity, or refraining from sexual encounters, protects the another person from feeling bonded to you, especially when you might not be ready to be bound by the responsibilities and the high costs that true love almost always demands.
The dignity of the human person means recognizing, in your beloved, that everything about them is sacred, most especially their immortal soul—their destiny before God. It also includes their fertility that God may use to bring future souls into this world. That means, before even entering into the covenant of marriage, you honor the other's body as "a temple of the Holy Spirit." (See 1 Cor. 3:16-17, 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16.) This is learning to love another through physical restraint and self-mastery.
Chastity is for married couples too. For my husband and myself, that translates into marital fidelity. We choose to be together first, always. But when circumstances separate us, and they will separate every couple periodically, both sexually and geographically, we stay faithfully attentive to one another. We talk every day and night even when we are apart. We stay away from the temptations to use porn, or flirt with other people, or drink alone.
There is no replacement or temporary fix for the occasional aches in the heart and body that we suffer when we cannot be together. Yet, here is where self-mastery again enters in. We offer it up as a sacrifice made on behalf of the other—as we keep each other's love in full view despite the distance or temporary separation—and it has served us well. This, too, is proof of the elastic grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony. Before marriage, the grace of the Eucharist sustained us—thank God there is such a remedy for our humble, fleeting, and fickle human strength. Now we have the holy bonds of Matrimony too.
Love is a great multiplier and so love begets more love. Sexual love finds its height in its fruitfulness, in the gift of a child.
The beauty of children in a marriage is a cure for any remaining selfishness I may have brought into marriage. The presence of children pulled my love for Bob out of shape, and that's a good thing. Children grew my love. If our marriage started out with our just wanting to lay our lives down for our spouse, such that we thought we could never be happier, well, children made us think again.
Becoming someone's mother or father is one of the greatest gifts of love. With children, we learned the "more" of marital love . . . what that great love we had for our spouse was really for. Having a family raised our couple-love to an order of magnitude beyond what we could dare or imagine. And we fell more in love with each other as we watched each other grow into fatherhood and motherhood.
Bob and I just came back last week from visiting our youngest son, the only one still in college. As we were driving together we were smiling: we still love being parents, no matter the ages of our children. Sure it is quite changed from the years of raising little ones. But to have come through years of the happy and sad occasions associated with each child, and to see them now launching out as adults capable of starting families of their own—well, that's a bitter sweetness we'd drink in any day of the week.
Some wise sage once said that when you have a child you learn what it is to watch your heart walk around outside in another person's body. That's a good analogy, but it still falls short of the Catholic view of family life. If we believe what we profess in the Creed, that the Lord is "the giver of life," then we must see our children's lives through a heavenly lens, for the very heart of God is tied to every human heart that beats. What parents get to see and experience is in some small measure is what God's Fatherhood is all about. God's heart is walking around on the earth in our children. This is why we are to love one another. God first loved us. It is why Pope Benedict XVI so wisely preached that, "each of us is the result of a thought of God" (Homily, April 24, 2005).
God will never let us go; we will always have a place in his heart. His love is always faithful. Our children remind us that love has an everlasting component that lives on, long after we have to let each other go, at least, in this earthly life.
Our marriage, in big and small ways, seeks to imitate this Godly, faithful love. We are still learning what that means, but we are so grateful to have had thirty years thus far to take it all in.
So, young people out there, you didn't ask for any advice, but humor a midlife woman on her 30th wedding anniversary. I have a few suggestions.
Trust God and prepare yourself for a future mate by learning to love Jesus first.
Trust the Sacraments and the graces of the Church.
Trust the ways of chastity and the enormity of delight that it will bring on the other side of your vows.
Remember to be not afraid: it has always been counter-cultural to live as a Christian. But once you dive deep into knowing and learning what love really is, you will learn that it is never counter-intuitive.
Love will cost you everything, and it will be a debt you will gladly pay.
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:13).

