“The sacraments cannot be understood in the abstract, neither as bare precepts nor an abstract ritualism. In this sense, therefore, it may not be a mistake to understand sacramentality as God's involvement and loving interaction with humanity. This is in fact a grace-filled encounter.”
The above passage leapt off the page for me because next month my husband and I celebrate thirty years of marriage. How I wish we had understood more about the sacramentality of marriage than we did in the early days! Like many young couples in western society, we loved each other and we were ‘in love’, and we loved God, so we married in the Church. However, in the beginning we didn’t fully appreciate that in Christian marriage a couple do not receive the sacrament from God but that we are the sacrament to each other. Had we been fully conscious of this fact right from the start, I know we would have thought twice before saying or doing hurtful or thoughtless or selfish things to the other.
Regardless, God slowly revealed through his grace to each of us as individuals and then as a couple, that despite our own private motives for marriage we had been brought together by God for his purpose. Initially we each had professed to love God and each other, but had never actually, willingly surrendered our lives as a couple, to God until much later in the marriage when we saw, with great awe, and then acceptance and welcomed, the unique and very distinctive signs and symbols of God’s presence in our lives. Through his divine grace, God has taken us to a deeper level in our relationship, as a couple, with him to understand that a sacramental marriage is not about us – it is about us believing that we belong to God as a couple and that we have been brought together by God for his purpose, to fulfil a mission together for God. In us, he wants a living sign and symbol of Christ’s love for his Church in everything - always. As for the times of suffering in our marriage, as Bishop Robert Barron says, the suffering in our marriage is Christ living his life in us, because suffering is the price of love.
KC
The above passage leapt off the page for me because next month my husband and I celebrate thirty years of marriage. How I wish we had understood more about the sacramentality of marriage than we did in the early days! Like many young couples in western society, we loved each other and we were ‘in love’, and we loved God, so we married in the Church. However, in the beginning we didn’t fully appreciate that in Christian marriage a couple do not receive the sacrament from God but that we are the sacrament to each other. Had we been fully conscious of this fact right from the start, I know we would have thought twice before saying or doing hurtful or thoughtless or selfish things to the other.
Regardless, God slowly revealed through his grace to each of us as individuals and then as a couple, that despite our own private motives for marriage we had been brought together by God for his purpose. Initially we each had professed to love God and each other, but had never actually, willingly surrendered our lives as a couple, to God until much later in the marriage when we saw, with great awe, and then acceptance and welcomed, the unique and very distinctive signs and symbols of God’s presence in our lives. Through his divine grace, God has taken us to a deeper level in our relationship, as a couple, with him to understand that a sacramental marriage is not about us – it is about us believing that we belong to God as a couple and that we have been brought together by God for his purpose, to fulfil a mission together for God. In us, he wants a living sign and symbol of Christ’s love for his Church in everything - always. As for the times of suffering in our marriage, as Bishop Robert Barron says, the suffering in our marriage is Christ living his life in us, because suffering is the price of love.
KC
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