June 22, 2012 – Catechism 1601 – 1608

Although I am writing this one a little late, it seems fitting to be writing about marriage after I just celebrated my Anniversary.  We went out to lunch and watched our wedding video.  One things watching the video allows us to do is to go back and think about the vows and think about the questions that the priest asked us on that day.  Think about what we expected from our spouse, from ourselves.  Sometimes we forget what our commitment was, at least what we said, on that day.  We get lost in the day to day, kids going here and there, jobs, bills, meals, it all becomes a tangle of life and moves by like water down the river.  When we stop and watch that, we take the time to reflect on whether we are fulfilling those roles we are called to. 

These paragraphs introduce us to the Sacrament of marriage.  It is a hot button topic now because all the talk on homosexual marriage.  As the headings suggest, Marriage is God’s Plan, Marriage is ordered from creation, and Marriage is damaged by sin.  In order to understand the Catholic understanding of marriage, you really have to dig deep into the first chapters of Genesis.  That is where the Pope spent a lot of time when he was going through his Theology of the Body.  The special bond that is shared between a husband and a wife is modeled after that creative act of creating woman from man and their bond.  They were made from and for each other.  Through their union they are made complete.  (Jerry Maguire’s “you complete me” is very Biblical)  Sin distorts this relationship and when a husband and wife seek to fulfill that initial bond that was there before sin, that is when they start to find true happiness. 

Everything that distort marriage away from that first ordered union of man and woman is the result of sin and takes us further away from happiness, not closer.  Many do not like to hear things like that, but I don’t like to hear things said about how great certain beliefs are either.