UK National Marriage Week (5)

As National Marriage Week comes to an end, I thought to mention the Sixth World Meeting of Families that took place in Mexico in January. In my previous posts I have presented four key features of marriage: it takes place between a man and a woman, it is permanent, it is open to life and it is at the service of the communion of the couple who are married. The nature of marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman that is an image of the relationship between God and creation (when marriage is seen as a "natural institution") and between Christ and the Church (when marriage is seen as a Sacrament) - this nature of marriage as a covenant runs through all four aspects.

A very interesting address was given to the World Meeting by Fr Raniero Cantalamessa. His address had the title "Family Relationships and Values according to the Bible". The full text can be found at the ZENIT website, and I do recommend a reading of the full text for the variety of its insights. I offer some passages and comments here.

My first passages, taken from two different parts of Fr Cantalamessa's talk and therefore connected in a way perhaps not originally intended, offer an interesting insight into the life of a single person as much as a married person. I have added emphasis to try and indicate how I think these passages refer to the life of single people - the "first step" and "includes right from the beginning" - suggest that there is something here that is appropriate to all people, whether married or not, that single life has its sense of being nuptial through the distinctiveness of relationship to the opposite sex (the experience of boyfriend/girlfriend).

Opening oneself to the opposite sex is the first step toward opening oneself to others, our neighbors, and to the Other with a capital O, which is God. Marriage is born under the sign of humility; it is the recognition of dependence and therefore of one's condition of being a creature. Falling in love with a woman or a man is the completion of the most radical act of humility. It is becoming a beggar and telling the other person, "I'm not enough for myself, I need your being." If, as Schleiermacher said, the essence of religion is the "sense of dependence" ("Abhaengigheitsgefuehl") on God, then human sexuality is the first school of religion....

John Paul II, in a Wednesday catechesis said:"The human body, with its sex, and its masculinity and femininity seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation, as in the whole natural order. It includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and -- by means of this gift -- fulfills the meaning of his being and existence."

I found this next passage interesting because of the way in which it indicates that marriage seen as an image of the relationship between God and his chosen people is strongly rooted in the Old Testament.

The prophets played an important role by shedding light on God's initial plan for marriage, especially Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah. They posited the union of man and woman as a symbol of the covenant between God and his people. As a result of this, they once again shed light on the values of mutual love, fidelity and indissolubility that characterize God's love for Israel. All the phases and sufferings of spousal love are described and used in this regard: the beauty of love in the early stage of courtship (cf. Jeremiah 2:2), the fullness of joy on the wedding day (cf. Isaiah 62:5), the drama of separation (cf. Hosea 2:4) and finally the rebirth, full of hope, of the old bond (cf. Hosea 2:16, Isaiah 54:8)....

We have to read the Song of Songs in the light of this prophetic tradition. This represents a rebirth of the vision of marriage as eros, as attraction of the man to the woman (in this case, also of the woman to the man); it presents the oldest account of creation.

On the other hand, certain modern exegesis is mistaken when it tries to interpret the Song of Songs exclusively in terms of human love between a man and a woman. The author of Songs writes from within the religious history of his people, where human love was assumed by the prophets to be a metaphor for the covenant between God and his people. Hosea turned his own marital situation into a metaphor for the relations between God and Israel. How could we imagine that the author of Songs would leave all of that behind? The mystical interpretation of Songs, beloved in the tradition of Israel and the Church, is not a later imposition, but rather it is in some way implicit in the text. Far from detracting from human love, it confers upon it new beauty and splendor.

In discussing the account in the Synoptic Gospels of Jesus answer to the question about divorce, Fr Cantalamessa comments:

...I want to emphasize the "implicit sacramental foundation of marriage" present in Jesus' response. The words "What God has joined" say that marriage is not a purely secular reality, fruit of human will; there is a sacred aspect to marriage that is rooted in divine will. The elevation of marriage to a "sacrament" therefore is not based solely on the weak argument of Jesus' presence at the wedding of Cana, nor in the text of Ephesians 5 alone. In a certain way it begins with the earthly Jesus and is part of his leading all things to the beginning. John Paul II is also right when he defines marriage as the "oldest sacrament."

This does, of course, have an interesting implication for the distinction that can be made between marriage as a "natural institution" and marriage as a "sacrament". It suggests that this distinction is, at best, of limited validity. The natural is ordered towards the sacramental, and the sacramental has grown from seeds present in the natural.

Fr Cantalamessa suggests that it is a mistake to concentrate efforts on behalf of marriage only on efforts to resist or overturn laws that are to the detriment of marriage. He suggests a greater commitment to witnessing, in concrete examples of married life, to the truth contained in Catholic teaching about marriage. Fr Cantalamessa presents this as the approach of dialogue with the world that can be seen in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Here is one example of how Fr Cantalamessa approaches this:

Applying this method of dialogue means trying to see if even behind the most radical attacks there is a positive request that we should welcome....

In his encyclical "Deus Caritas Est," Pope Benedict XVI has gone even farther, writing deep and new things with regards to eros in marriage and in the very relationship between God and man. "This close relationship between eros and marriage that the Bible presents has practically no parallel in literature outside itself."

The unusually positive reaction to this papal encyclical shows to what degree a peaceful presentation of the Christian truth is more productive than rebutting the error of others, even though we should find room for this as well, at the proper time and place. We are far from agreeing with the consequences that some today draw from this premise: for example, that any type of eros is enough to constitute a marriage, even that between persons of the same sex; but this rejection gains greater strength and credibility if it is connected to the recognition of the underlying goodness of the request and as well with a healthy self criticism....

Fr Cantalamessa does not lack robustness in his analysis of the ideological challenges to marriage:

Among the representatives of the so-called gender revolution, this idea has led to crazy proposals, such as that of abolishing the distinction between sexes and substituting it with the more elastic and subjective distinction of genders" (masculine, feminine, variable) or that of freeing women from the slavery of maternity, providing other means, invented by man, for the production of children. (It is not clear who would continue to have interest or desire at this point in having children.)

It is precisely through choosing to dialogue and engage in self criticism that we have the right to denounce these projects as "inhuman," in other words, contrary to not only God's will, but also to the good of humanity.

Christians' task of rediscovering and fully living the biblical ideal of marriage and family is no less important than defending it. In this way it can be proposed again to the world with facts, more so than with words.