The Love That Saves

His name was Ed, and he had been married to Peggy for 57 years.

Ed had come to a presentation of the Catholicism series at the parish and we were visiting over coffee beforehand. Ed was talking about his marriage, and at one point he leaned in and whispered, “I don’t know if this is true to what the Church teaches, but I have come to believe that my salvation is inextricably bound to my fidelity to the vows I made to my wife 57 years ago (verbatim).” His eyes actually teared up when he said it.

I thought of Jesus’ words, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith (Mt 8:10).”

Ed got it. He grasped something that far too few of us Catholics seem to comprehend. That for those of us who live the sacrament of matrimony, our marriage is our vocation, that is, the particular road the Lord has set us upon for the salvation of our souls. For the sacramentally married, marriage is, to be blunt, the way the Lord has chosen for us to get out the hell out of ourselves and into communion and thereby save our very souls. We are called to embrace this divine love that saves.

We are all called to the love that saves. But we are called in different ways. Some are called to the priesthood, some to the consecrated life, some to live as singles in service to the Church, and most of us, to the sacrament of matrimony. But make no mistake about it--- we are all called to this love.

A disclaimer: I don’t know how to love my bride with this love. I don’t.

But I know who does. In fact, I know the One who does. And sometimes it is knowing that that makes all the difference. 

In the Bible, in salvation history, the Lord uses the imagery of marriage more than any other to represent His love and our relationship with Him. Marriage is, as it were, an icon of the love between Christ and His Church (cf. CCC 1617).

So is it any wonder that there are many people out there--- even many within the Church--- who fail to comprehend and embrace God’s life-giving love? If marriage is the primary biblical image of God’s covenantal love, and yet more than half of marriages fail today, how might that affect people’s perception of God’s love? The divorce rate is so high today that it becomes reasonable to ask: If this icon of God’s love is being smashed to bits, how can anyone know the love of God? What do words of “steadfast love,” used time and again in the Bible to describe God’s love, really mean to the generations of children of the “divorce culture?” You have to witness something of steadfast love, a love that never quits, to believe it, right?

Most alarmingly, there are many children and youth who haven’t a clue that God is love, and that he wishes to free them to love authentically and to experience a richness and fullness of life that many of their contemporaries will never know. As Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” This is because the mass of human beings--- even in the Church--- have not truly embraced the Gospel. Sadly, many have not connected Thoreau's stark observation of the human condition to Augustine’s famous line, “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” How few see that his haunting prayer, written over fifteen centuries ago, is the prescription to Thoreau’s diagnosis of the nagging restlessness of man.

This disconnect with the reality that we are only truly human when we are in communion with God makes for a very broken society. We are a society of insecure and unfulfilled human beings because we have forgotten who we are and who we are called to be. The most visible earthly sign of our call to union with God, the sacrament of matrimony, has been defaced, and so the Gospel of God's steadfast love obscured.

So what can we do about it? How can we, the married, the ministers of the covenant of matrimony, contribute to the restoration of this ancient icon of God's covenantal love?

Relationships are hard. They test us and sometimes they even seem to bring out the worst in us. In a fallen world, the term Nuptial Union sometimes seems an oxymoron.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says it bluntly: “Every man experiences evil around him and within himself. This experience makes itself felt in the relationships between man and woman. Their union has always been threatened by discord, a spirit of domination, infidelity, jealousy, and conflicts that can escalate into hatred and separation (CCC 1606).”

Look at your own experience of marital love, and I would wager you, like me, see the profound truth in this.

Let’s look to Jesus for the answer. Remember my disclaimer: I said that I don’t know how to love my wife the way I should, but I do know the One who does. Of course, I meant Jesus Christ, who showed us what sacrificial love is. (By the way, all authentic love is sacrificial by nature, so we shouldn’t have to put the qualifier “sacrificial” before the word “love,” but because our culture has hijacked the word “love” along with so many others, and redefined it for us to mean something bland and weightless, I use the qualifier “sacrificial” to remind us the nature of real love.)

Jesus was truly “given for you (His own words).”

His was a love that went all the way. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (Jn 13:1).”

Saint Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote in Ephesians: “…be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Eph. 5:1-2)” For more on what it means to “walk in love,” prayerfully read 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, in its entirety. Perhaps many of us had this reading at our wedding, but I wonder how many of us really listened? Love is patient, love is kind… you know the reading. But do we really know the reading?

1 Corinthians 13 speaks in the love language that our culture is desperate to hear. Our culture is dying for want of this love. Jesus embodied the language of this beloved passage. Jesus was the perfect gift of self for the good of the other, which is the real nature of authentic love.

Blessed (soon to be SAINT, God willing!) John Paul II, quoting a document from the Second Vatican Council, wrote: “The meaning of lies in ‘being a gift which is fully realized in the giving of self.’”

In Jesus we discover the secret to love, to sacrificial love, to dying for the good of the other. And this love leads to a joy that is beyond telling. As Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has said so beautifully, “There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.” Joy is the delightful response to being in the presence of the one we love. Joy becomes a gift we share with our spouse the closer we draw to the Lord.

In Jesus, we are able to live this love, denying ourselves and laying our very lives on the line for the good of the beloved. In Christ Jesus we are able to love our spouse with the love that loved His own Bride, the Church. And in that, we experience a joy in our marriage that the culture sort of gapes at in disbelief.

But it takes right focus.

When my attention is wholly on the Lord, I am able to love my wife wholly in the Lord. And vice versa. 

When I was eighteen years old and away at school, I received a letter from my new girlfriend, a kind-hearted Christian. I was not, at the time, a Christian, and in fact was somewhat hostile to religion in general (but that’s another story for some other time). I thought this young woman’s devotion to Jesus was harmless, if quaint. In her letter she confessed her love for me for the first time. She wrote, “I love you, but I need to tell you that there is one in my life that I love more, and must love more, always.”

My initial surge of happiness squelched, my mouth dropped as I thought, Where is she going with this?

She went on: “My first love is Jesus Christ. He is and must always be the first man in my life.”

I just about choked. Is she kidding?

First of all, how does a dude like me compete with Him? I may not have been religious, but I wasn’t stupid (just foolish)! I knew I could never edge a guy like Him out of the love game.

Of course the irony is that today I am married to a girl who would say the same, and I am so grateful that the Lord is her Number One Love! There is something very attractive to a “man of God” about a “woman of God.” I find her rightly ordered love a most deeply attractive quality. She knows who she is, and who her Lord is. Her self-image is not tied up in me. I am not the source of her happiness. She has not laid that burden on me, which is good, because I can’t even make myself happy for five minutes (I find myself incredibly boring, as a matter of fact!).

And I think therein lies the secret: When I put the Lord first in my life, when He becomes the supreme love of my life, all other loves become rightly ordered.

Think about it. If Christ is the center of my life, and he is the center of my spouse's life, and we are both moving toward Him in love, then we are naturally going to move toward one another. It isn’t rocket science.

So the secret--- wait for it--- to loving your spouse, to loving her or him with His love, the love that saves, is to more perfectly love Jesus Christ.

Increasing one’s devotion to the Lord is the only way to grow in one’s intimate companionship with one’s spouse. For the Christian, there are no exceptions to this rule.

I have traditionally called my wife “my best friend.” But I am going to stop saying that. I think that confuses the matter. Today "best friend" is such an inadequate and ambiguous term. It is better to say that she is “my intimate companion on life’s journey."

Sadly, not all married couples can say that. There must be various reasons for that. I am not a marriage counselor. I don’t know why couple’s cannot say that about one another; I don’t know their circumstances.

But I do know this: Jesus Christ is the answer to every question. I know that He is the glue to every healthy bond.

This is something that my friend, Ed, got. He knew that fidelity to his wedding vows, made fifty-seven years ago, is the key to his learning to love, and so to his salvation. As St. John of the Cross said, "In the twilight of life, God will... judge us... on how well we have loved." In the sacrament of matrimony, I learn to love and be loved. My capacity for love is directly proportional to the size of my heart, stretched as it is by a life spent loving and being loved.

If I can’t love my most intimate companion with God’s love, I am simply lost.

If I can learn to love her, though, through patient striving and by continually coming to the Lord in the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance, I just may be able to realize God’s dream for me: that I be with Him in eternity in Heaven.

The sacrament of matrimony is the arena where most of the baptized experience the love and mercy of God most powerfully. As my friend Ed understood, it is the place where we, the married, work out our salvation “in fear and trembling,” where God teaches us to love and be loved, and to prepare our hearts for union with Him in Heaven.