Marriage as blessing: Established by God

		A Culture  of Life  Kimberly Hahn

Marriage is, after all, God's idea. The Second Vatican Council fathers insisted: "The intimate partnership of married life and love has been established by the Creator and qualified by his laws . . . God himself is the author of matrimony."

The one-flesh union of persons in the act of marriage is so powerful - the two becoming one - that, as my husband puts it, "Nine months later you might have to give it a name." It constitutes an entirely new person. The two persons have become three persons in one family, reflecting the three-in-one Trinity.

This is an unspeakable privilege: God invites us into the inner sanctum of who he is as life-giving Lover, to reflect the communion of trinitarian love in our human family, imaging the total self-donation of love that called us into being and now allows us to participate in a new being's creation.

Giving and receiving

Adam and Eve needed to respect the way God had designed them and the estate of marriage. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has noted: "The gift of life which God the Creator and Father has entrusted to man calls him to appreciate the inestimable value of what he has been given and to take responsibility for it."

Unlike all the creatures that copulate based merely on animal instinct, the response of spouses in openness to life is based on a rational and respectful act in obedience to God and in love for each other.

People do not differ from the animals because they can plan conception; rather they differ from animals because they can use their rational faculties and their souls to comprehend the covenantal meaning of marriage. They can embrace all that the act of marriage involves in the giving and receiving of persons.

Eternal command

We may be tempted to think, Surely the rules in marriage changed once sin entered the picture, from the ideal of the Garden of Eden to the reality of life after the Fall.

When everything was perfect, it was easy for Adam and Eve to be open to life and to trust God to take care of things. But a fallen world, replete with fallen people, presented a new set of circumstances.

It was more difficult to provide for the family (weeds), it was more difficult to produce children without trauma (pain increased in childbearing), and there were more marital conflicts over leadership.

In fact, over many years, sin became so rampant that God wiped out everyone except for Noah, his wife, their sons, and their sons' spouses.

After the Flood, the door opened to a renewed world, a fresh start. What were the first words out of God's mouth to the four married couples in this new creation? "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth."'

Primary end

Just as with Adam and Eve, the first blessing/command shows how procreation is the primary end of marriage. The Catechism adds this note of explanation: "After the fall, marriage helps to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one's own pleasure, and to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self giving."

Old Testament passages refer to other blessings from the act of marriage in addition to procreation: unification (see Gn 2:24) and pleasure (see the Song of Solomon). These blessings are distinguishable but not separable.

Pope John Paul II writes: "The two dimensions of conjugal union, the unitive and the procreative, cannot be artificially separated without damaging the deepest truth of the conjugal act itself." Together these two dimensions form an unbreakable union in the act of marriage.

This column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com and is reprinted from Kimberly Hahn's book, Life-Giving Love (St. Anthony Messenger Press).