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One to get married

One to get married

Last updated on: January 31, 2017 at 2:36 pm by Kate Cousino

One to get married 2017-01-31T14:36:46-04:00 Kate Cousino

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I haven’t been writing a ton lately, partly because I’ve been working a lot, and parenting, and keeping house, and generally don’t have a lot of time to be reflective and write. Partly because I just haven’t had much to say that seemed worth saying in this forum, rather than on Facebook, or on the phone. Other reasons, too, which will probably turn into a post, or possibly not.

Anyway, it turns out all I really need to get myself writing again is to get caught up in discussions over someone else’s writing on a topic that I care about.

Marriage.

Not an easy topic for me these days, but certainly one I have put a lot of thought and prayer into.

For background, read here, here, and here. I’m basically copying comments I wrote on Facebook and elsewhere while discussing the above posts, particularly with regard to the two posts written by Emma Smith, a young, engaged Catholic writer.

Her entire thesis, as I read it, is that the difference and beauty in Catholic marriage (compared to the worldly marriages her coworkers are used to) is that God makes available to us the graces necessary to have beautiful and grace-filled marriages. It is, of course, true that God is not stingy with the graces conferred by any sacramental state.

But I think she is wrong about the kind of witness Catholic marriage has to offer the world, and about what her coworkers have wrong in their understanding of marriage. They are not wrong that any marriage is a gamble. The reality is that marriage is always a gamble. You might think (as Smith does) that you’ve stacked the deck, but it is still a gamble. There are so many things that can change a person throughout life, and free will is always absolute.

She’s wrong about what sets us apart when we make these vows and make them part of ourselves. It isn’t that our shared faith lets us know that our spouse’s devotion and values will never change in any important sense, because we have all of the grace we need. What makes our vows truly awe-inspiring is that they don’t remove an iota of freedom, or make any restrictions at all on change.

What I’m wrestling with is how to write about this frankly, kind of scandalous-to-the-world aspect of Catholic marriage. You make these vows, and you are married to a particular person—and even though everything about them, everything that makes this person who you know him (or her) to be can change by outside action or at will, their nature and identity as that person-whom-you-are-bound-to-by-your-vows-and-the-sacrament cannot change.

We make vows to someone in good health, which we must keep when they are ill, when they are dying. We make vows to someone who knows us and loves us, which we must keep if they forget us or despise us (dementia, anyone? traumatic brain damage?). We make vows to someone who is charming, kind, thoughtful, and we keep them when they are selfish, cruel, sinful. We make vows to someone who is tall, but might someday be an amputee; who is intelligent, but may someday lose their faculties; who is cheerful, but may someday become depressive; who is faith-filled, but may someday despair and curse God.

Everything about that person can and may change—body, mind, heart, they may seem completely different from the person you married, and indeed, in modern parlance we would talk about a person who changes so radically as being “a different person than he/she was.” But really, none of that is who they are.

I don’t really know how to talk about this. I don’t really know how to make it make sense to anyone, because of course all of these ‘accidents’ of personality, appearance, characteristics, and choices really are expressions of the person, and they change because persons change, and sometimes they change and that changes the person. But our vows persist. There are no exceptions for change, willed or unwilled.

The witness of Catholic marriage, the way in which marriage shares in and witnesses to Christ’s love, is found in the individual commitment of each person to their vows, this commitment that is not conditional or limited. THAT is the love Christ has for each of us, and while it is not wrong to stack the deck and make all the human efforts possible to find a spouse who seems likely to make it through life close to Christ, who is compatible, who is going to work hard with us and make marriage joy-filled and radiant…that’s not actually what the end goal of marriage is.

The end goal of marriage is for you, yourself, autonomously, individually, before God (and sometimes known only to God) to be sanctified through faithfulness to your vows and the graces of living out that sacramental state, and to participate in a small semblance of the kind of love for another person that God has for each of us.

And the beauty of that—and the thing the world does not understand, will not understand—is that none of that has anything to do with whether or not anyone but you, yourself, does anything you expect or want them to.

That’s what sets sacramental marriage apart. Not a heavenly stamp of approval or an extra boost to attain the same ideal of romantic love that all the world is already chasing. God willing and the creek don’t rise, all of that will come anyhow. But there are no fewer graces in a troubled or seemingly broken marriage than in a glowing, joyful one.

As the woman said, God is faithful.

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