The secret of a good marriage
By all means marry, if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. Socrates.
My favourite introductory story to marriage is the following:
Your grandfather proposed to me with a piece of candy. We had nothing. He knelt down and told me: I have nothing now, just a piece of candy, but if you want, we can build everything together.
I opened the candy, divided it in two and we ate it. From that moment we divided and shared everything. We fell, we got up, and we built. All together. We have experienced difficult moments, tiredness, but we have always been there for each other. Until the last breath.
No amount of preaching shapes a soul as much as seeing someone living an honest life. The most powerful marriage course is seeing a couple living a good marriage. I was blessed to witness the marriage lived by my parents. They were always rich in love and devotion to each other.
They struggled to make a living farming hilly, rocky and dry land. They faced financial strain that threatened to defeat them. Here again, their reliance was on God, and so they kept the faith and struggled on.
Worldwide Marriage Encounter tells us, “If a couple is married in church and continues to go to church, only one in fifty fails; but where the couple is married in church, continues to go to church and has a prayer life together, the failure is one in one thousand and five.” We prayed with our parents – the daily rosary and daily prayers.
Theirs was a sacramental marriage. “In Christianity ‘the word becomes flesh,’ God enters into the physical, and thus everything that is physical is potentially sacramental,” so says author Ron Rolheiser in his article “Everyday life as a Sacrament.”
Ron goes on to say, “For Christians, the whole world is holy and everything in it, especially the physical, is potential material for sacrament. …our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, …the food we eat is sacramental, and in our work and in our sexual embrace we are co-creators with God.”
“We can use prayer to reconnect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins,” he continues. We stand on holy ground, and our everyday activities come laden with sacrament, he says.
My parents lived that sacramental life. Like St Paul, I do not brag when I acknowledge the influence of my parents on my life and marriage. Financial struggles, my wife and I had them. I remember a month when I was working and she was still at university when our pay cheque was spent covering the overdraft of the previous month. We persisted; our faith never wavering.
Thanks to our parents, we knew we could build the faith in our family unit, the domestic church. Here we could place God and our faith as the centre of our lives. The rituals of family prayer strengthen and protect the faith. The family that prays together, stays together.
In retrospect, our choice in partners addressed the incompleteness in our lives that can only be filled by another or by God. We had the ability to dream and to create in the beautiful freedom of Christian love.
At the beginning of our marriage we only dreamed of the tremendous gifts we would receive as we tried to carry out our vocation. I speak here of children and God’s Grace.
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