Rounding out our reflections on the Mt. Everest of marriage
05/31/2025
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the
fellowship of the ring led by Gandalf decides to burrow into the deep tunnels
dug by dwarfs rather than attempting to climb the Misty Mountains exteriorly.
Our path on the Mt. Everest of marriage now also turns away from the daunting
outside to the dark inside as we follow the lead of Pope St. John Paul II’s
theology of the body.
Our papal Sherpa leads us through
two tunnels at the end of chapter one of Part Two. First, John Paul explains
that marriage is indissoluble, that term expresses the words of the wedding
vows that couples say: “Till death do us part.”
And the pope-saint leads us through
a second tunnel showing us that every child born from a marriage brings an
undying hope to the family. An old Spanish adage says: “Every child is born
with a loaf of bread under his arm.” Every baby is born as a beacon of hope.
I help couples understand the importance
of indissolubility by joking: “I don’t care how big your biceps are, you cannot
tear apart what God puts together.” After all, Jesus declared in Mt 19:6,
“Therefore what God has joined let man not separate.” In other words,
marriage’s indissolubility flows far more from what God does at a wedding than
what the couple does.
The Holy Father goes a step further
by connecting this indissolubility to the inner life of God, saying: “To such a
unity and such a communion of Persons [Persons of the Holy Trinity], are
dedicated Christ’s words referring to marriage as the primordial sacrament”
(517).
The root reason marriage is
indissoluble, therefore, is because spouses are caught up in a love that is far
more than human; God’s grace raptures them up into the eternal love beating in
the heart of the Holy Trinity. Consequently, spouses should not divorce because
the Holy Trinity does not divorce. This is the deepest meaning of
indissolubility.
John Paul will state this with even
greater precision:
When Christ…confirms marriage as a
sacrament instituted by the Creator “at the beginning” – when he accordingly
requires its indissolubility – he thereby opens marriage to the salvific action
of God[‘s grace], to the powers…which help to overcome the consequences of sin,
and to build the unity of man and woman (518).
God never asks us to do something
for which he does not give us the proper tools. God gives every married couple
the mission – sometimes it feels like a “mission impossible” – of being an
unbreakable mirror of the Holy Trinity.
I have worked with married couples
who stay together even after one of them commits adultery because they both
draw on those “powers which help them overcome the consequences of sin, and to
build the unity of man and woman.” Indissolubility is the “mission impossible”
called marriage.
A second tunnel John Paul invites
us to explore is the “hope of everyday” that every baby brings by its birth.
One of my favorite professors at the University of Dallas was Dr. Janet Smith.
She taught philosophy but she had the uncanny knack for making it practical.
One day she said very memorably: “Having a baby is like induced maturity.”
She went on to elaborate: “When you
are just a couple, it is easy to be selfish and only worry about yourself. But
the day you have a baby you start thinking about how safe the playgrounds are,
what shows are on television, who is the chief of police, who’s on the school
board, etc.” Babies, in other words, grow us adults up.
Michael Waldstein, the translator
of the theology of the body, breaks down John Paul often complex language into
baby talk that heck even I can understand. He explains how babies give their
parents the hope of Christian maturity:
"Life according to the Spirit
also expresses itself in mutual knowledge (Genesis 4:1), by which the spouses
submit their masculinity and femininity to the blessing of fruitfulness
[birthing babies, as we say]. It expresses itself in the deep awareness of the
holiness of the new life to which both give rise” (755).
I will never forget my brother’s
words when he described how he felt holding his first-born son in the delivery
room. First, he felt a wave of love wash over him. He knew he could die for
this baby. Then he felt not a wave but a tsunami of responsibility for this
baby. He was responsible for the baby's every need. Can you say “induced
maturity”? Every baby brings the hope that their parents will grow up.
Of course, this is not an
infallible hope – hope intrinsically carries a certain uncertainty – as we can
see all around us. Grandparents are raising grandchildren because parents have
summarily abdicated their parental duties. And the scourge of abortion has not
significantly abated in spite of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v.
Wade.
Nonetheless, every baby brings a
bright hope from heaven. And that is precisely why they come to earth: to
remind us our true hope lies in heaven, that is, in God’s grace, and where,
finally, “God will be all in all” (1 Co 15:25).
Perhaps we can now briefly
summarize the long mile we have covered in walking around and admiring the
magnificent Mt. Everest of marriage. Following our faithful Sherpa, John Paul
II, we scaled the sides of marriage by four passes. First, we discovered how
marriage helps us see the Church as both the Body and the Bride of Christ.
Second, we learned how divine grace
is best understood as a gift, especially in light of the gift of the body
spouses exchange in sexual intimacy. Third, we reflected on the similarity
between the Father’s creation in the beginning and the Son’s redemption in the
end as both reflecting the love of the triune God.
All salvation history is a marital
affair from beginning to end. And fourth we saw how marriage shed its lucid
light on the other six sacraments, shining on their hidden depths as six
aspects of the mystical marriage with Christ. Jesus the Bridegroom loves us “in
the spousal way” which is none other than the sacramental way.
But then our fearless Sherpa led us
into the darker but no less divine tunnels within the mountain of marriage. He
pointed out how marriage is indissoluble and unbreakable, like the love of the
indivisible Holy Trinity.
And in a second tunnel John Paul
helped us discover the hope that every baby brings to his or her parents, but
also to the whole world. Babies make us more human, and their greatest hope is
to make us more Christian. The loaf of bread every baby brings may turn out to
be the Eucharist.
Praised be Jesus
Christ!
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