|
|
1.Church every Sunday 2.God first, family and friends second, self last. 3.Man must die to woman as Christ did for the Church 4.Woman must submit to man as the church does for Christ.  "A Civilization of Love", by Carl Anderson
We have discussed how being made in the image of God—the imago dei—is seen and practiced in service of others. In a special way, it is found uniquely within marriage and the family—the first context of persons mentioned in Genesis: “And He said ‘Let us make man in our own image.’.. . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Yet in order to understand love in the family, it is helpful to first examine the “our” of “in our own image”—the Trinity. “It is the doctrine of the imago Dei that decides the destiny of all theology” said theologian Emil Brunner. But what does this really mean for us? The mystery of the Trinity is perhaps the most profound and difficult for human minds to understand. One legend says that St. Augustine was contemplating this doctrine one day when he was walking along the shore. He saw a small child take water out of the sea with a shell and pour it into a small hole in the sand. Augustine asked the child what he was doing. The child said, “I’m emptying the sea into this hole.” “But you’ll never be able to fit the whole sea into that hole,” said Augustine. The child, who was really an angel, replied, “No more will you be able to understand the mystery of the Trinity” Nevertheless, Augustine went on to complete his treatise De Trinitate (“On the Trinity,” written between AD. 400 and 420), now long considered the classic work on this mystery For Augustine, human beings resemble the Trinity principally in the different aspects of the mind. Examining the nature of thought, divides it into memory understanding, and will (or love). “Here we are then with the mind remembering itself, understanding itself, loving itself,” he writes. “If we see this we see a trinity, not yet God of course, but already the image of God.” For Augustine, the human being as a rational creature is the image of God. Augustine’s view sounded the keynote for the discussion for many centuries. Yet John Paul II made a revolutionary change in the discussion with his proposal that human beings resemble the Trinity in our interpersonal relationships as well as interpersonal relationships. In his 1994 Letter to Families, John Paul II wrote, “In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine ‘We’ is the eternal pattern of the human ‘we’, especially of that ‘we’ formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness.” Angelo Cardinal Scola, the patriarch of Venice, suggests that while the classic doctrine of the imago Dei formulated by St. Augustine cannot be ignored, the human person must also be “considered in his entirety,” that is, “insofar as he is created from the beginning as man and woman.” If this is so, it automatically takes us to marriage and the family. Not only is the family almost always the locus of a person’s most important relationships, the family metaphor has been built into the language of Christian doctrine, which, after all, speaks of a Father and a Son. This idea has been frequently echoed in Christian literature and art. After the death of the Dutch artist Rembrandt in 1661 officials found in his studio a painting they considered unfinished. Titled The Return of the Prodigal Son, it remains one of his greatest masterpieces. As is well known, the prodigal son (see Luke 15:11—32) insisted upon his inheritance early and embarked on a way of life that could only be seen as a total repudiation of his family’s values. His isolation from them is complete when, by his own recklessness, he is driven into poverty The painting depicts the moment when the son returns, kneels before his father, and embraces him. His father returns the embrace, his hands on his son’s shoulders, drawing him still closer to himself. The father’s eyes are closed, but it is obvious that he now sees his son in a way that transcends what is merely visible. The father’s face is bathed in light, a sign of the grace that has brought him and his son to this moment. There is no smile on his face. His own suffering and that which he now sees in his son’s condition are too profound. Rembrandt depicts the father wearing a red mantle, traditionally a symbol of the Lord’s glory. This image reminds us what the Church Fathers taught: the glory of the Lord is man redeemed. The son is redeemed by his return. The father, too, finds redemption in his willingness to accept the son’s return. Thus the grace of God the Father is sufficient to reconcile father and son and to heal the family. The parable of the Prodigal Son places one petition of the Lord’s Prayer within the context of the family: “Our Father forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Rembrandt has painted the prodigal son in such a way that he represents Everyman kneeling repentant before the Father. Love implies both a self and an other, one who loves and the one who is loved—figuratively, a Father and a Son. This self and this other must have some point of contact that connects them. This point of contact, this means of connection, is nothing other than love. Love can be equated with the Holy Spirit, who, in the language of the creed, “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” It is in this way that conjugal love mirrors the love of the Trinity. In his recent book, Divine Likeness, Marc Cardinal Ouellet, archbishop of Quebec, writes: Similarly, Ouellet points out that the dynamic of love moves from “I” to “Thou” to “We”: “The reciprocal gift of the man and woman in faith first and foremost generates the couple as such, which is already a ‘third’ in respect to the two individuals who constitute it.” These insights resemble those of the classic work I and Thou by the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber, who said that any genuine relationship moves from an “I-it” polarity to a relationship of “I-Thou.” At first, we may see the other person simply as an object, a means of gratifying our needs and desires. Developmental psychologists tell us that infants begin by thinking this way At some point, however, we realize that the other is a living subject, an “I” like oneself. In other words, the “it” becomes a “Thou.” It is only here between an “I” and a “Thou” that a relationship, a true love, can begin. As John Paul II writes, “Being a person in the image and likeness of God thus also involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other ‘I.’ This is a prelude to the definitive self-revelation of the triune God: a living unity in the communion of the Father Son, and Holy Spirit.” Thus, in this Christian understanding of the I-Thou relationship, each person is called to communion - a special one that reflects that communion of love existing within the Trinity. But John Paul II sees this communion as even more particular: this communion has a special form because God has created humanity as male and female. Because the human person is created male and female, the vocation to love, which is each person’s calling, has a special form, and that form is revealed most clearly in the marriage relationship. Christian marriage therefore is a primary way in which we find revealed God’s plan for humanity to participate in the expressive love of Trinitarian communion. Ouellet speaks of three stages in the growth of marital love. The first “marks the passage from being in love to really loving the person. Being in love always carries an element of illusion and the projections of one’s own I. It is not exempt from a hidden egoism that emerges from the circumstances.” One could add that this egoism stems precisely from viewing the other as a kind of “it,” a means of gratifying certain desires and achieving certain objectives, some of them innocent in themselves, some of them no doubt less so. Genuine love, on the other hand, “accepts the other as she is, and not as the ideal person he would like her to be.” The transition between love for the other as an “it,” a mere compendium of desirable qualities, to a “Thou” is beautifully expressed by the nineteenth-century English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose own marriage with Robert Browning offers one of the most sublime examples of marital love in literary history If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only. Do not say “I love her for her smile—her look—her way Of speaking gently... For these things in themselves, Beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so.... But love me for love’s sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity’ The second phase of marital love, according to Ouellet, is the transformation of love to charity What began as romantic love between a man and a woman grows into a type of the love expressed by Christ for his bride, the church. “Little by little, the charity Christ becomes the ‘form’ of their love, with its characteristics pure gratuity proven fidelity and perpetuity.” In this way Christ enters into the fabric and substance of the couple’s love for each other. This is the meaning of St. Paul’s hymn to love in his First Letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.... It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Thus, Christ’s love becomes the form of married love. Finally love undergoes its third metamorphosis, and here, too we see a reflection of the Trinity and another sense in which man and woman are the image and likeness of God. God is creative; God causes new life to come into existence. A man and a woman joined in the sacred bond of marriage have the same privilege and responsibility. Ouellet speaks of “the spiritual and physical fecundity of love.” In bearing and raising children, a married couple reflects the creative power of God himself. In this way the family is its own culture of life and culture of love and becomes the essential building block of the civilization of love. But children cannot be brought into the world and left to their own devices. Even if they survived, they would almost certainly be unable to reach the full potential of their humanity with the support and guidance that only a loving home can offer. Thus the creative power of the family lies not only in its “fecundity" but in its capacity to pass on the essential truths of human existence—which are the mysteries of Christianity—to the children it raises, “so that,” as John Paul II has said, “family life itself becomes an itinerary of faith and in some way a Christian initiation and a school of following Christ.” Today, marriage is under increased pressure, with the number of married women in the United States standing at a mere 51 percent. For every two marriages contracted in the United States in the 1990S, there was one divorce, Of all people in the United States over fifteen years of age, 20 percent have been divorced at some point. Among adults in the fifty to fifty-nine age group, the figure is approximately 40 percent.’ The assumption, of course, is that by divorcing, spouses will be happier by leaving an unhappy marriage. Psychotherapeutic thinking in the 1970s and 1980s largely dismissed commitment to children as a reason for trying to ‘save’ a marriage. Commitment to self was all,” observes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in her book The Divorce Culture. Sadly, spouses who buy into such reasoning will often find themselves misled. A 2002 study concluded: Unhappily married adults who divorced or separated were no happier, on average, than unhappily married adults who stayed married. Even unhappy spouses who had divorced and remarried were no happier, on average, than unhappy spouses who stayed married. This was true even after controlling for race, age, gender, and income.’ Divorce not only shatters the lives of the two spouses but also forces children to pay the consequences of their parents’ actions. Both statistical and anecdotal evidence suggest that children of divorce are victims whose emotional scars linger long after their parents’ marriage ends. Elizabeth Marquardt, herself a child of divorce, conducted a study of more than fifteen hundred children from divorced homes and discussed her findings in her 2005 book, Between Two Worlds. She wrote of such children: This is the truth about us: Some of us, many more than those from intact families, struggle with serious problems. Our parents’ divorce is linked to our higher rates of depression, suicidal attempts and thoughts, health problems, childhood sexual abuse, school dropout, failure to attend college, arrests, addiction, teen pregnancy, and more. Some of us were practically abandoned to raise ourselves in the wake of our parents’ divorce and turned to drugs or alcohol or thrill seeking to numb our pain. Some of us were abused by new adults who came into the house when one of our parents left. Some of us continue to struggle with the scars left from our parents’ divorce: we have a harder time finishing school, getting and keeping jobs, maintaining relationships, and having lasting marriages. We end up living on the margins, struggling with our pain, while our friends and neighbors move on with their lives. Yet those who are visibly suffering are the tip of the iceberg. The others, the ones without seriously disabling problems, are everywhere—at your workplace, at school, at church. We don’t look much different from anyone else. We might seem a bit more guarded, a bit slower to make new friends, a bit more anxious about life in general. But we do manage to make friends, to fall in love, accomplish goals, succeed at work. Some of us do quite well. If you ask any of us about our lives, though, you’11 discover that our parents’ divorce is central to the story of our childhoods and to who we are today. We grew up too soon. We were not sure where we belonged . .. we had to figure out things for ourselves—what is right and wrong, what to believe, whether there is a God. We never knew if could ask for help if we needed it. When we faced struggles, we thought it was up to us alone to make sense of it, because the silence about our childhoods seemed to leave us little other choice. This snapshot reveals just how traumatic divorce is for children. Studies have shown that children of divorce have difficulty with their own relationships, with adjusting to adulthood, and with God and religion. This combination of wounded parents and traumatized children provides a real challenge to the church at large and to those ministering as pastors of souls. Every priest and marriage counselor ought to know how destructive divorce is and how rarely it betters life even for the divorcees. Many programs exist that can help save a marriage, and these are to be commended, but other programs must be created to reach out to those who have been adversely affected by divorce. ‘While some Catholic parishes have such programs for adult divorcees, few, if any, have programs for the children of divorce. This must change if we are to give the next generation the tools to build a culture of love. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the principal purpose of marriage was the “good of the offspring” and that in accomplishing this purpose, “nature intends not only the begetting of offspring, but also its education and development.” Therefore, Aquinas ob- served that “we derive three things from our parents, namely existence, nourishment and education.” Aquinas also distinguished the human family from that of other animals, such as birds who need the support of parents for a relatively short time, concluding that with the human person, “since the child needs the parents’ care for a long time, there is a very great tie between male and female.” In Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II sought to provide a more comprehensive theological understanding of the marital relationship and the responsibility of parents when he wrote: Being rooted in the personal and total self-giving of the couple, and being required by the good of the children, the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His revelation: He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church. Here, at last, we find the love that “bears all things,” and the love that “endures all things”—even to the cross. It is here that the married couple unites their love to that “love that never ends” that they may participate in “love’s eternity.” The Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov goes so far as to say, “By virtue of the sacrament of matrimony, every couple marries Christ.” John Paul II often spoke of marriage in terms of the total gift of one’s self to another person. The totality of this gift has always been understood in the Catholic tradition to include the irrevocability of the gift. If the gift can be recalled, that is, if the unity the persons that the gift makes possible is conditioned upon the possibility that it can be dissolved, it cannot be considered total. This conditional giving then cannot mirror Christ’s gift of himself to the church, which so often has been described precisely as the gift of the bridegroom to his bride. John Paul II described St. Paul’s “hymn to love” in his First Letter to the Corinthians as the Magna Carta of the civilization of love. He then explained that this understanding of Christ like love is the key element in building a civilization of love. “What is important,” he wrote, “is not so much individual actions (whether selfish or altruistic), so much as the radical acceptance of the understanding of man as a person who ‘finds himself’ by making a sincere gift of self. . . . This is the most important dimension of the civilization of love.” Another way in which the church has viewed the mystery the “sincere gift of self” of husband and wife to each other is in the matter of their marital intimacy Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”) reaffirmed the church’s teaching that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life,” He pointed out that the coact has “two inseparable aspects: union and procreation.” Birth control violates both. The fact that it impedes procreation is obvious, but how does it affect the union of the couple? Paul VI stressed that contraception risks dehumanizing the relationship between husband and wife: It is also to be feared that the man,growing used to the employment of contraceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion. For Paul VI, then, contraception runs the substantial risk of retrogression in the marital relationship. “Thou” is demoted to “it.” Elaborating on Paul VI’s teaching, John Paul II explains that withholding an essential part of the sexual act puts a block in the way of the “communion of persons.” If marriage is characterized by the total giving of self in love to the other, contraception imposes a barrier between them; the self-giving is no longer total and unconditional. As a result, blocking the procreative nature of the spouses’ physical union does violence to the union of the two persons in the marriage, which John Paul II states must always be a union “in truth and love.” “It can be said that in the case of an artificial separation of these two aspects, a real bodily union is carried out in the conjugal act, but it does not correspond to the interior truth and to the dignity of personal communion-communion of persons,” John Paul II observed. In his Letter to Families, he explained in more depth: In the conjugal act, husband and wife are called to confirm in a responsible way the mutual gift of self which they have made to each other in the marriage covenant. The logic of the total gift of self to the other involves a potential openness to procreation: in this way the marriage is called to even greater fulfillment as a family Certainly the mutual gift of husband and wife does not have the begetting of children as its only end, but is in itself a mutual communion of love and of life. The intimate truth of this gift must always be safeguarded. The “intimate truth” of which the pope speaks has been experienced by many married couples who have sought to live their intimate lives together while maintaining this “openness” to procreation. In doing so, they have benefited from new developments in natural family planning over the past several decades. This new method enables a couple to time their periods of intimacy to coincide precisely with infertile times in the wife’s cycle. Natural family planning “differs from the old ‘Rhythm’ method in being based on sound scientific information which allows the woman to observe accurately the signs and symptoms of her fertility cycle.” Admittedly, some argue that natural methods maybe less effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies than some forms of artificial birth control. On the other hand, some advocates of natural family planning have found that, conservatively practiced, this method is virtually 100 percent effective and in any event, it avoids the serious potential consequences, chemical and barrier birth-control methods. Natural family planning has many significant benefits of its own and many Catholic couples say that it has blessed their marriages. Some even have used it to help conceive a child after years of infertility Married couples practicing natural family planning to avoid pregnancy often find that their mutual commitment to this approach strengthens their knowledge of and communication with each other. In a study of the psychological effects of natural family planning. Richard J. Fehring, associate professor at the Marquette University College of Nursing, found that the majority of couples using this method felt that it enhanced their sense of spiritual well being. Fehring believes that such natural methods “can help a person be more open to the needs of one’s spouse” and “more enriching to this relationship.” The Christian perspective on responsible procreative decision making is based on the fact that we have not created ourselves and that our life is a gift. We all depend upon someone else for our existence, and ultimately that someone is God. All life a gift—a gift that is a result of an expressive love that flows from the God who Is love. Therefore we are called to live in a manner that reflects both the nature of the giver and the gift. This way of life is dedicated to self-sacrifice in service to others. We cannot receive the gift of life adequately—nor can we fully live in an authentically human way—without making our own lives a gift to others: a gift of ourselves to our spouse and then, in turn, to our children. This community of persons in which the unconditional gift of self is taken up as a way of life is the primary way in which the family shines as a domestic church. John Paul II believed that “Through the family passes the primary current of the civilization of love. “The family is the first and greatest bulwark against the encroachment of lifelessness and materialism on contemporary culture. This is because, in the first place, the family is the setting in which new life is brought into the world and nurtured to the point where it can survive independently. Just as important, the family is the vehicle for transmitting to the rising generation the values that will shape it and guide it into the future. If the truths of human existence and destiny are to be imparted to our children, it will happen primarily in this nexus. For this reason it is no exaggeration to say that the ultimate fate of the human race lies in the family. And the ultimate fate of the family lies in the integrity of the intimate life of husband and wife. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has increasingly focused on the family as a context for living the Christian life. Today, it is increasingly common to speak of the family as the “domestic church.” This is not merely rhetorical. The ideal of the family as the domestic church goes back to the Old Testament. It was stated most simply and eloquently, perhaps, by Joshua: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” It was developed in the New Testament: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” And it has been treated many times since then by the p82 great thinkers of Christianity The Church Father St. John Chrysostom (A.D. 347—407), for example, wrote, “Make of your home church, because you are accountable for the salvation of your children and your servants.” Developing further this ancient idea of the Christian family a domestic church, John Paul II often remarked that he view the Christian family as the primary point of encounter between the church and culture. Consequently, he encouraged a deep pastoral reflection on the role of the Christian family that is only in its beginnings. The challenge to theologians and pastors is clearly presented in the following statement by John Paul II: The family itself is the great mystery of God. As the “domestic church,” it is the bride of Christ. The Universal Church, and every Particular Church in her, is most immediately revealed as the bride of Christ in the “domestic church” and in its experience of love: conjugal love, paternal love and maternal love, fraternal love, the love of a community of persons and of generations. John Paul II stressed that “in the future, evangelization depend largely on the domestic Church.” How? Not many families are likely to take an active role in evangelizing as such. And although the family is the means by which the Christian faith is handed down from generation to generation, even this fact does not exhaust the meaning of John Paul II’s assertion. Rather he is saying that family is—and will be—the chief witness to the active power of the love of God in the world. “The essence and role of the family are in the final analysis specified by love. Hence the family has the mission to guard, reveal, and communicate love, and this is a living reflect and a real sharing in God’s love for humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church His bride.” Cardinal Scola suggests an important dimension in this consideration. He writes, “In defining the family as ‘domestic church' Vatican Council II opened the way to a consideration of the family as a dimension of evangelization. The reality of the church as universal sacrament of salvation is present in the family and is so with a particular concreteness and clarity that are not owed simply to the fact that the family is that reality which reaches farthest into the ultimate expression of the human.” Yet, Scola maintains that, “it is the sacramentality of marriage that makes the family objectively a ‘domestic church,’ and thus a dimension of evangelization.” Because of the sacramental character of marriage, the Christian family “is the most common, universal, and basic expression of the manner in which Christ is joined to thechurch” and because of that “the family carries within itself the deep meaning that the church has for the world: the enduring presence of Christ.” When we understand the family as “domestic church” in light of the sacramental nature of marriage, we are able to see that in their commitment to the family, Christian husbands and wives carry out both their vocation as spouses and their vocation as laymen and laywomen to renew and evangelize society John Paul II proposed a profound renewal of the sacramental understanding of marriage and in this way has also proposed a profound renewal of Christian family life through the appreciation of the family as In doing so, he echoed the words of Tertullian from the earliest centuries of Christianity: “How can I ever express the happiness of the marriage that is joined together by the Church, strengthened by an offering, sealed by a blessing, announced by angels and ratified by the Father? How wonderful the bond between two believers, with a single hope, a single desire, a single observance, a single service! They are both brethren and both fellow-servants; there is no separation between them in spirit or flesh; in fact they are truly two in one flesh, and where the flesh is one, one is the spirit.” SUGGESTIONS FOR CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION 1.Spend some time reflecting on the family you grew up in. What were the key values that you were raised with? How do you express these values in your life today? 2.When you read or watch media news, look for instances which life is spoken of in impersonal or mechanical terms, particularly regarding issues like abortion and stem cell research. How are the attitudes of mass culture shaping this discussion? 3.If you have a spouse, take some time to consider how you regard her (or him). Do you genuinely regard yourself being joined to your spouse as “one flesh”? Is there a subtle—or powerful—sense of” my” interests as opposed to “hers” or “his”? In what parts of your marriage does this tend to manifest itself? Has it made your marriage happier or less happy? 4.Make a point sometime within the next week to do something that will bring you closer to your spouse. The practice may be most powerful if you use it as an occasion to see the other person’s point of view in an area where you have been in long disagreement. 5.If you have children, look at the values they are express in their behavior and activities and their dress. How close are these to the highest values that you hold? Are they an expression of the truths of Christianity, or of the value of secular mass culture? If it is the latter, reflect on how you may have encouraged this tendency in them, and implement some simple ways to change it. Hint: the changes will be stronger and more long lasting if they are in your own behavior rather than mere orders imposed on your children. |
|
