The Sacrament of Marriage – Thoughts for the New Year

A highly educated layman, with more Catholic credentials than I ever came across before, made a statement which simply poleaxed me. He said that he could not understand why, after being baptised by the Holy Spirit in the River Jordon, Christ rushed off to the wedding of an unknown couple at a remote village called Cana in Galilee. Why this unnecessary diversion? Why did he not forego this secular celebration that usually ended up in overindulgence anyway, to go without delay to preach the coming of God’s Kingdom? Nor therefore, why Pope St John Paul II should make it the second of the new Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary in 2002? His misunderstanding must be addressed, lest others make the same mistake and misunderstand a vital sacrament without which God’s plan could not be implemented after Christ’s glorification. Let me explain.

The promise made to Abraham to make a great nation out of his seed, and the promise of a Messiah to lead them totally depended on the families who would be instrumental in the fulfilment of this promise. No families – no future. That is why the rite of circumcision by which the means of bringing about more people to populate this new nation was a sacred rite and why those who could not procreate in the Old Testament were considered cursed by God.

The Wedding Feast at Cana

Christ purposely chose to go to this wedding at Cana before all else, not just to recognise this sacred sacrament of the Old Testament but to draw attention to and sacralise in advance what would become the great sacrament of the New Testament. For marriage would become the basis of the new religion that he was to found. It would become the place where new Christians would be born, nurtured and taught by word and example, to love in a new way in families born,  not from human conception alone, but by a new conception of the Holy Spirit when they were baptised. Christ’s ever-present and all-consuming loving would support and sustain them through the other sacraments for the rest of their lives.

From a Living to a Nominal Faith

In those first Christian centuries, they believed in this love and that they could access it with their vital living faith. It was this faith that induced them and their families to renounce all and everything that prevented them from abandoning themselves to receive this supernatural loving, every moment of every day of their lives. Unfortunately today after thousands of years, the Church has become so moribund with institutionalism, formalism and the nominalism that goes with it, that what was once a vital living faith has for the majority become little more than a ceremonial faith. The same Creed is still recited but what was for the first Christians the clarion call to daily action is now no more than another rather tedious expression of their cultural identity.

If in the early Church, five percent were nominal Catholics and ninety-five percent were as active as the apostles who inspired them, then today these figures would have to be reversed.

Time for a Reawakening

The only way that they can be reversed is by a gigantic reawakening in which believers can once more believe in the massive spiritual fusion of divine energy that is being poured out of Christ and ask with all earnestness and with practical intent how to receive it. The same answer must be given that was given to the first Christians who acted on what they were told with an ongoing immediacy that changed the world. They had to learn how to love the God whose love was at all times infinitely loving them with his infinite loving. Look no further than to the person of Christ himself, for it was in loving him alone, that they could open themselves to receive his love in return.

That is why meditation became the first step towards generating personal love for Christ as he was on earth so that this love could be redirected to loving him now as he is in heaven. This led to a deeper and more profound form of praying, in, with and through Christ, called mystical contemplation. This always begins in darkness because God’s infinite loving so highlights the evil that is in us, that separates us from the goodness that is in him. Only if we are prepared to persevere in prayer and for very many months or rather years,  can our desire to love God be so purified that we can begin to receive what can alone change us, our families and those other families whom Christ wants to reach out to through us. That this mystical purification took place so widely and deeply in the early Church is clearly evident from the massive conversions that the Holy Spirit was able to bring about, working through those who were sufficiently purified to receive him.

The Habit of Selfless Giving

Although without them realising it, in Contemplation believers learn like never before, to take up their daily cross by dying to self, by what came to be called white martyrdom. Here a habit of selfless giving is learnt. It is this habit of selfless loving that then enables them to receive in ever greater fulness the infinite loving that overflows into their families, into their work and into everything that they say or do each day.  When everyone in the Church is united in doing this together, then the families set afire by love become the beacons from which the light of Christ can transform the world. That is why the family was, as it always will be, the place from which God’s love reaches out to set the Church and then the world afire with the only love that can be its salvation.

Both a Miracle and a Sign

Accepting the invitation to the marriage feast at Cana was not Christ’s way of making merry after so much suffering in the desert, and before the arduous task of teaching and preaching in the months ahead. It was far more than that. It was a celebration of the great sacrament that enabled God’s promise to Abraham to be fulfilled through human loving. It was at the same time a symbolic promise of a new and far more profound sacrament to bring about God’s new plans, not just for one race, but for the whole of the human race. The other Gospel writers might have called the turning of water into wine a miracle, which of course it was, but St John calls it a sign. It is a sign of the new sacrament of love in which human love would be suffused and surcharged with divine love.

In other words, it would far surpass the inner dynamism of the old sacrament, as the inner dynamism of wine surpasses water. The new sacrament of marriage would put the family, and the human and the divine love that is generated there, as the foundation and the consummation of the love that would spread and bond together the new Kingdom of God on earth.

The families that prayed together did stay together They conquered the pagan world with the love of Christ who was born again in their holy families, through the same Holy Spirit who brought him to birth at Bethlehem.

David’s free course on prayer and his latest book is available at Essentialist Press