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What’s in a Word... Like Matrimony?

John & Pat Brewster

(Excerpted from 1982 July-August Worldwide Family Spirit magazine)

A while back we were spending an evening with some friends, including Richard, a priest heavily involved in retreat work. He is also a very talented actor and comedian. Given any role, Richard can put himself into the shoes of that person, delivering an impromptu monologue.

Richard was in rare form that night. At one point, he did a take-off on the role of a rather stuffy retreat director welcoming a married couple who have just arrived at the monastery to begin a retreat.

One of his more outrageous lines went something like this: "It is always edifying to see you married lay people come to our monastery to try and seek out some spirituality." By the end of his performance, we had laughed to the point of tears.

Somehow, he had neatly speared so much of what we had all heard (or thought) over the years that implies that marriage is a second-best choice most people have to settle for when it comes to following Jesus through a vocation. Many of the popular Lives of the Saints-type books from the past helped reinforce such an attitude. Time and again, legend recounts that when a spouse experienced a deep encounter with God, he or she went off by himself to a monastery or convent.

In their own way, such stories communicate that the marriage relationship is an obstacle to sanctity rather than a road to it. Perhaps, the best that married couples could hope to do to make their lives more holy would be to incorporate some of the monastic practices and devotions into their daily routines.

New Awareness
Today, through the Spirit's power, we have a greater understanding of the particular invitation Jesus extends to married couples. We're blessed to live in a time where there is a growing awareness that as husband and wife, it is primarily in and through our daily lived-out life with each other that we are called to encounter the Lord.

As husband and wife we have received the same invitation that all baptized Christians have . . namely, a call to respond to the love of the Father by living the Gospel of Jesus in our daily lives under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

However, that invitation is extended to us not only as individual persons, but in a unique way to us as a couple who is Sacrament and with whom our Father, Jesus, and the Spirit dwell in a special way. It is in our married life with all its realities that we find our path home.

What Already Is
Sometimes, a couple declares that they are not a very spiritual couple. Or else they admire some other couple and comment that they themselves are not "there" yet.

If that's our hang-up about encountering God as a couple, then we need to reflect on a basic truth. The relationship between ourselves and God has already been established by the Lord . . . it already is! We don't have to be a perfect couple or any particular kind of couple in order to qualify.

From the moment we said our first "yes" to each other on our original wedding day, He has come to make His home with us. We didn't leave Him behind in the church on our wedding day. Nor did He stand at the curb with all the others and wave us off. He has been with us whether we recognized Him or not. And with a faithful and passionate love, He longs to draw us into greater intimacy with Himself.

Hunger For God
Someone once asked St. Thomas Aquinas, "What does it take to go to sanctity?" He answered simply . . . "One must want it."

We ask, "What does it take for us as a couple to go to God together?" The answer . . . "We must want it.

If we don’t experience a hunger for God in our married lives, then we need to realize how much He wants to break through whatever barriers are there. We should ask Him to demolish whatever obstacles are hemming us in.

Sometimes though, as a couple we can experience a hunger for God and yet fail to recognize the source of that hunger. We think our desire for God is something we have developed all by ourselves.

Someone once compared this approach to God to the fable about the rooster, Chanticleer. As you may remember, the rooster was convinced that it was his crowing that awakened the sun. He was certain that the day could never break without him. But the truth was far more beautiful than he dreamed. With the first pale rays of dawn, it was the sun that awakened the rooster and he was only the herald of all the warmth and light at the heart of the universe.

We make the very same mistake with regard to our couple relationship with God when we behave as if we have to rouse a sleeping God, move an indifferent God, contact a far-away God.

It is a tremendous moment when we realize that our very desire for God in our marriage is a gift and something beyond our power to manufacture.

Our hunger for the Lord is really His hunger for us. Whether our desire is a faint stirring or a blazing fire, it should be cause for thanksgiving and praise. That hunger is the Spirit of God already at work in our marriage. That's the cause of all our hope.

Jesus in the Midst
In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says, "Wherever two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in their midst." We can all probably recall large gatherings where we truly felt the presence of Jesus.

But notice that Jesus also talks about two persons 'being gathered in His name. Although His promise is given to all mankind, we're convinced that there's a very special invitation here for every married couple because of our unique way of life.

In our marriage, Jesus is challenging us to become two who gather in His name. His name is Love. When there is mutual love between our spouse and ourself, we open ourselves to the, reality of having Jesus in our midst. (We should all go back and reread that lost sentence for it points toward a profound reality.)

Jesus is calling us to be lovers, in the fullness of the Gospel meaning of love. And there are no born lovers. No one is as self-centered as a newborn baby. He sees himself as the center of the universe. Our whole life is a constant effort to break out of that self-centeredness.

Jesus calls us to Himself through the daily opportunities we have to love our spouse. This loving isn't removed from the world and its nitty-gritty details. It's rooted in flesh and blood living and loving.

We can express it by listening wholeheartedly to each other, by sharing our thoughts and feelings with our spouse, by cooking meals, through running errands, through conversations of every kind, through our sexual relationship, through balancing the checkbook . . in short, by making love in everyway. There is not a single aspect of our married life excluded from Jesus' call to live love between us.

Underlying Reason
Jesus calls us to Himself, though not so the three of us can retreat into some private, comfortable, isolated cocoon and let the rest of the world go by.

The more we try to open ourselves to His Presence within our love relationship, the more the experience of God's love goes beyond ourselves. In some way, His love will reach out through us to those around us, beginning with our family but not ending there.

Our lives may be the only Bible some people will read. And so the, Lord calls us to sanctity as a couple not, just for our own sake, but so that others may experience His love through us.

This won't happen because we go around with pious expressions on our faces or preach on street corners. Rather, it will flow from our trying to live a lifestyle of mutual love in our marriage.

When a couple seeks to live that way, then no matter what the specific details of their lives, the gift they have to offer others will be Jesus Himself- Jesus in their midst as they talk with others, Jesus with them as they ride in the car, Jesus with them at a meeting or party, Jesus with them at the dinner table with their children.

Take any "ordinary" day of your life and make a list of all those you came in contact with during that period. It can be startling in its length.

Our own list for today includes our children, the paper boy, the water meter man, three prospective buyers for our son's car, our future daughter in-law, assorted friends of our children, three sales clerks and a door-to-door salesman. We didn't talk about Jesus with any of them but all of those moments were genuine calls to open the occasion to the power of His love.

We have a plaque in our kitchen that says, "Bloom Where You Are Planted." It reminds us to take a look around. The call to love is right here and now. We can't predict who will be in our lives the rest of this day, tomorrow or the next day. But this much we do know-there will be people and we are called to love them.

Reaching Out
We also need to look in an active way at the needs beyond our home and daily contacts.

To a large degree, our local parish is where we put down roots and attach ourselves to our faith community. In our parish, married couples offer Pre-Cana, and baptismal preparation programs, serve as lectors, teach in religious-ed classes, serve on the Parish Council as a unit (one position, one vote), and work together through social services to mention just a few areas.

It wasn't always so. It happened because couples caught a vision and began to live it out in their daily lives. In your parish, there may be existing programs or you may be challenged to initiate new ways of serving others as a couple.

The pursuit of justice is within the process of growth in holiness. Areas such as consumer education, schools, pro-life activities, politics, environment, world hunger and social justice are fields for Spirit led action that seek to affect the very structures of society.

Witnessing to the Gospel can be something as simple as writing to government officials about an issue. Periodically, our local representatives send us opinion questionnaires. We're usually tempted to discard them. Who really pays attention to our views?

Yet, when the results are published we realize that 85% of those responding indicate on one item that increasing aid to mental hospitals is among their least concerns. An almost equal percentage are eager for the development of another county golf course. How do such attitudes and priorities affect the actions of our public officials?

To be led by the Spirit means to involve ourselves in learning about issues and questioning all the structures of society in terms of Gospel values. It means working in whatever ways the Spirit suggests to help create an environment which is supportive of human growth and dignity.

Excuses, excuses
Not to be involved as a couple with others is like resigning from the human race. It's saying: "We don't care."

We can hide behind all sorts of excuses. A couple may Protest, "We aren't joiners." However, by the very fact we have been called to the Sacrament of Matrimony, we have been called to be a particular revelation of Jesus Christ to the Church and to the world.

By its very nature, our way of life joins us to others. We can choose to ignore that reality but it won't change the fact.

We may say that our family is our apostolate. It does seem at times that all our energy and attention are absorbed in the daily business of family life. Maybe saying our family is our apostolate might have some claim to validity if we all lived behind the four walls of our home from birth to death, never emerging into the outside world.

But we live in a global village and our children go out into it everyday. One day they will take their places as adults in that world. If we truly love our children, then we need to work at changing that world with our love for their sakes as well as for all mankind.

A couple may protest, "We have nothing to offer. We aren't that kind of couple." However, the mandate to go out and preach the good news through our married lives isn't limited to the outgoing, the extrovert or couples with special talents. It's for all of us.

Would we deny a starving man bread we've just baked because we think it doesn't have enough salt and we might do better tomorrow? In effect, we can say the same thing to the world and hide behind excuses of needing more time to prepare ourselves. "Starve a little longer, world, while we work at being perfect."

But there's no such thing as that perfect couple. Rather we're being called by Jesus to serve now. What we have to offer will flow from whatever part of the growing process our relationship happens to be at in any given moment. The timing isn't our own. The Spirit is there nudging us over the line. Reaching out means taking a risk.

A couple may say that they're not comfortable reaching out to others, but the Scriptures really don't say that we are called to serve only when we are comfortable.

We recall an experience a few years back when we were asked to talk to a college class about marriage. We had had little contact with that age group and all the talk about "generation gaps" had made us very uneasy at the prospect. Our fears really blossomed when we discovered that the previous week's speakers had been a couple in their early twenties, married less than a year.

There was no graceful way to back out. We finally decided all we could do was to try to be ourselves and simply offer that in our remarks and answers to their questions.

Afterwards, we discovered that the students had had a deep need to experience that couples married beyond the honeymoon stage could be deeply committed to one another and find Matrimony even more exciting and fulfilling with each passing year.

If we try to respond to others out of love, the presence of God will be experienced by them in ways we can't imagine or predict.

Ongoing Discovery
"God loves you just as you are-but too much to leave you that way."

We can paraphrase that popular banner and say that in our marriage, The Lord loves us as the couple we are at any given moment, but He also loves us too much to leave us that way." And so He pursues us with a passion.

In C.S. Lewis' book, The Screwtape Letters, the experienced devil, Screwtape, advises junior devils how to worm their way into the lives of men. At one point, he comments, "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds; in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."

Even in our wildest imagining, our own hopes and goals for our marriage are but faint reflections of the dream our Father envisions and calls us to.

There is more, so much more waiting for us as a couple if we're willing to work at it with the help of our God who lives with us. It is in that daily "yes" to each other that we invite Him to accomplish His work in and through us.

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