Love and Marriage

My first concrete memories of love & marriage would not be a great place to start.  As a child, at some point in time I realized that my mother & father were "married".  I probably didn't know what that meant, but over time I figured it couldn't be good.  My parents were not a good match and outside of giving life to me and my sisters, not much else worked out for them.  I remember fighting, crying and eventually separation.  We moved in with my grandmother who was widowed so again, no great marriage examples.  There was an aunt & uncle who lived with us but it just did not connect for me.

Maybe the marriage example heroes in my life came through TV, the likes of the Walton's and Little House and some of the comedy shows of the day.  There was little to no talk of divorce and infidelity and certainly no same-sex stuff.

Love and marriage for me only became real, and I mean really real, when I met a young teenage girl in 9th grade.  Wendy and I would date from that time until we were in college and got married on June 4, 1977.  Back then we were truly naïve, had no money, lived in a small apartment and got pregnant right away.  We did the love and marriage thing pretty well, especially those years when God was front and center in our lives.  Ten years later, when we kind of pushed God aside, we were still in love, but other temptations came along and a period of ho-hum-ness.  By the time we were raising two children and flourishing in careers, we made a very real effort, as a family, to be a God-centered family again.  Love and marriage grew and grew and the more we got involved with our faith life, by learning and doing everything Catholic, the marriage grew and love truly became both agape love and kenotic love.  That dear people is love.  Love ain't all the things it is being portrayed in the media today, especially today.

Love and marriage became very meaningful once Wendy and I embraced the belief that our love, our married love, was all about loving each other all the way to heaven, all the way to eternal life with the God who is Love.

As a Christian, I love everybody even though some of you, because I won't stand up and party today because the Supreme Court of a once great nation redefines love and marriage, won't believe that.  You want me to love you by agreeing with and supporting that which makes you feel good now but can deprive you of eternal happiness in heaven.  Now I have no way of knowing who makes it to heaven or not, but God has clearly called out that which is sin and all of us fall short some of the time.  But there is an arrogance of persisting in sin with the events of today.  There is even a well orchestrated attempt, and it is working, to just get everybody, including some who claim self as Christian, to just declare that this sin or that sin just ain't sin no more.  Come on dude, Jesus wants us to just love.  Jesus just wants us to drop our stones and look at us and say I don't condemn you.  But we don't want the rest of the story either, we don't want to hear Jesus say, now go, and sin no more.

While I am on love and marriage let's also be clear that us heterosexuals have done a pretty good job of messing up this gift called marriage.  Divorce, infidelity, shacking up, objectifying, artificial chemical birth control, children limiting, throw away culture, all these things have attacked marriage long before same-sex marriage.  We need a strong and powerful recommitment to marriage as that which comes from God, one man and one woman, designed for the procreation of children, the transmission of life, that places God in the center and works tirelessly to help gain heaven for the other.

Love and marriage; it ain't want your politics says it is, or what the Supreme Court has decided it is, it is clearly what God has created and maintained through centuries.

And I thank God everyday for the gift of my marriage and those of all the many faithful witnesses to marriage as a Sacrament and/or a Covenant. 

And yes, I love all those who want to redefine it but I must stand firmly for what marriage is and will forever be, as given to mankind by God!