by Fr. Chuck Gallagher, S.J. | May 20, 2021 | EverMore Mindset, Marital Spirituality, What is marriage?
by Fr. Chuck Gallagher, S.J.
The whole world is screaming for community. Everybody admits the need for community – from sociologists and academics down to the normal man on the street. No one can deny the tremendous heartfelt need for closeness, roots, involvement in the lives of others, and for a caring community. We all want to care for others and be cared for by others.
And that is what is held out by Jesus. That is what the Church is all about – to bring alive the statement of Jesus that we are to love one another as he has loved us.
But in order to understand this community of love we are called to be, we have to get back to St. Paul’s great mystery. That is our bedrock – that the way a husband loves his wife reveals how Jesus loves the Church. We need to look to Matrimony. We need to examine it and see that our married people understand their own significance.
One of our problems, though, is that we don’t have an adequate understanding of any vocation, never mind the vocation of Matrimony. We keep mixing career and vocation. For example, we make being doctor or a lawyer or a teacher a vocation. It’s not – it’s a career, and a very good and very beautiful career that offers the possibility of a high level of service in accordance with the Gospel. But service (or ministry) looms too large in our consciousness. It takes too big a place in our understanding of what being Gospel is. We think the prime, almost exclusive mission Jesus Christ has called us to, is one of service rather than one of love, or to be more fair about it, we’ve equated love with service.
Service can be and frequently is an expression of the love that exists between people, but the real love is the relationship we establish with one another and that is only symbolized by what we do for one another.
Really, there are only four vocations in the Church: Matrimony, Dedicated Single Life, Religious Life and Priesthood. Each one of these vocations is a unique way to love within the faith family. The fact is that a vocation doesn’t focus on what we do. It’s a call to a specific relationship to the rest of the faithful. It is this relationship with the people of the Church that is our call and it is this we have to spend our life to establish.
How we exercise our talents can be our career. It might be as a librarian, a teacher, a director of religious education, a counselor, a social worker or what have you. Career or profession, then, concerns itself with ministry. Whereas vocation concerns itself with a way of life. Fundamentally, being a member of the Church is to commit myself to a way of life.
All too often, however, we look on vocation in terms of what we do: What do I do as a priest? What do I do as a sister? What do I do as a committed baptized-confirmed person? But that’s the second question. The first question and the basic one for the adult in the Church is: What fundamental relationship am I going to have with the people of God? As a celibate in Orders? As a celibate in community? As a married person? As a celibate lay person?
Only then can I ask myself: How am I going to spend that relationship in your midst? How am I going to spend my marriage? My Orders? My community? How am I going to express, in concrete terms, my relationship with my fellow believers? Whether that relationship is direct, such as priesthood, or indirect, such as marriage or religious life.
And when we grasp this idea of vocation, then we can begin to approach an understanding of the Sacrament of Matrimony and therefore of the Church.
Fr. Chuck Gallagher, S.J., was the founding director of the PMRC (now EverMore in Love). He was a compelling and prophetic voice in the Catholic Church for the Sacrament of Matrimony and the joy of the incarnation for over five decades, also founding Worldwide Marriage Encounter. This post is an excerpt of Fr. Chuck’s book, One Flesh
by EverMore | Apr 4, 2021 | EverMore Mindset, Integrated Sexuality, What is marriage?
by Brad DuPont
Recently I was remembering a time when my then my 5 year old daughter Maggie grabbed my hand while we were listening to the homily. I thought she just wanted to hold my hand, but I was wrong. She gave my hand to Libby, so we could hold hands during the homily. It deepened my realization that little ones want desperately for their parents to not only be together, but to be in love. It is sometimes easy to forget that one of the greatest gifts we can give our children is to constantly strive to grow in our marriage no matter how good or not-so-good it already is. No matter where we are in our marriages, the natural instinct of my daughter, Magdalene can give us deep insight into the supernatural reality of this Easter Season.
Passionate marriages are the soil in which our kids grow best.
What is it about an in love married couple that gives so much security to our littles? I think it has something to do with the fact that a married couple is intended to be the very reflection and concrete experience of the love and goodness of God. Every married couple has the mission to be a window into the life and love of the Holy Trinity. If the reflection that the couple is intended to convey is somehow cloudy, then the very stability that confidence in God’s existence offers is clouded. Children want to believe that they come from love. If a child knows that their existence is the fruit of love, then they are confident that they exist for a reason.
We all know that children are created out of the love of God and that there is a reason for the creation of every child, but we as parents sometimes forget that we are supposed to be the living and tangible reminder every day to that reality by the way we love one another. It is not just about participating with God in the child’s creation, and then focusing on the child and figuring that our spouse is old enough and can take care of their own needs. When we intentionally choose to nurture the married relationship, we create the culture for a child to grow in a stable environment. If we were going to plant a garden, we would not be very successful if we did not tend to the soil. Passionate marriages are the optimal soil for the seed of children to flourish!
Talk about the Passion.
Yes, I said “passionate!” Some are scandalized by that word, so let me define my terms. When I say passionate, I am not talking about “an urgency to make love.” That is how the world defines it, and it is important to reclaim the language. When I say “passion,” I am talking about the type of passion that we celebrated on Good Friday. And no, I am not saying that marriage is torture! I am saying that the total self-abandonment of Christ on the Cross is the same self-abandonment that a married couple is called to have toward one another. The grace that was won on Calvary and offered through the Resurrection is made present to and through the Sacrament of Matrimony. John Paul II said it best when he said that married couples are a, “permanent reminder to the Church of what Christ did on the Cross.” (Familiaris Consortio).
The mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection is present in every home, and what a wonderful plan in the wisdom of God. God knew that the Blessed Sacrament would not be able to make it into every home, but through Baptism and Matrimony, his sacramental presence has the potential to reach every house and neighborhood.
Personal, but not private.
Our marriages are personal but not private. When we embrace the call to love one another as Christ loved the Church, we participate in the sanctification of the world. We can sometimes dismiss evangelization as a good idea that some people should do out there somewhere, or we wait around for our parish priest to form an evangelization committee. The reality is that when we love our spouse passionately, we evangelize our children, our communities, and participate in the redemption of the whole world.
I invite every married man and woman, most especially myself, to step up the level of love in our relationship this Easter Season. The grace is abundant, and when we take the time to prioritize our marriage, we are entering deeply into the mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. If we enter into this mystery more deeply this Easter season, we will experience the power of Pentecost in a tangible way, and we will be a beacon of light in this world that struggles to see the path to authentic happiness.
Why not strengthen your marriage this Easter Season by doing something proactive for your marriage? A common mindset is that marriage retreats or workshops are for couples that are struggling, but this could not be farther from the truth. Healthy marriages intentionally “do something” for their marriage each year and don’t just wait until it gets bad in the same way that intentional maintenance on the family vehicle helps to avoid the need for bigger more costly repairs down the line.
We have both online and in-person events scheduled throughout the spring and summer. We’d love for you to join us for one!
Brad and Libby DuPont have been married since 2003 and live in Overland Park, KS with their son and daughter. They have been involved in national leadership for EverMore in Love for several years, and Libby currently serves as Director. They are grateful for strong coffee, decent wine and the fact that they both found someone who laughs at their jokes (usually).
by Libby | Mar 8, 2021 | EverMore Mindset, What is marriage?
by Libby DuPont
“Spouses are the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross.” ~Pope St. John Paul II
Some things were just meant to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Macaroni and cheese. Marriage and the cross. The cross is right there at the beginning. We vow to be true in good times and bad, sickness and health, richer and poorer. This makes sense, as we are signing up to love one another as Christ loves the Church, and in a fallen world, there is always sacrifice involved in true love.
But marriage itself is not meant to be the cross.
There is a narrative out there that suggests that falling in love is almost like a trap to get us to commit to one another. Then real-life sets in, and marriage becomes a cross that we drag behind us until we die. Any wonder many people are choosing not to marry?
It’s true that in some marriages, there are heavy crosses of addiction, abuse or infidelity. These are serious illnesses within a marriage that require serious treatment. But there are also less serious, “common cold” type sicknesses we endure within marriage we all encounter as well: misunderstandings, disagreements, taking one another for granted. These things don’t need to linger and make us miserable. Small, everyday frustrations do not need to equate to our marriage itself being a cross to endure!
When Brad and I attended our first retreat and the skills that followed, we had a good marriage. We loved one another dearly, and we were very well versed in our faith. But after 8 years, there were certain crosses we were beginning to accept as a permanent part of our marriage. Our first Weekend Immersion experience was so transformative because it spoke a liberating truth to us: it doesn’t have to be that way.
Over the last 9 years, we have been privileged to attend so many more retreats, and to teach the skills we learned to hundreds of couples. Each time we hear the truths, every time we practice the skills in our own marriage, we become more convinced that our marriage truly is meant to be our refuge from the inevitable crosses of life. When a loved one dies. When the kids go through something difficult. When the world shuts down for a deadly virus… our sacrament becomes the well from which we draw the strength to meet life’s challenges.
Wherever you are in your marriage, we invite you to come on back and review some of the skills and insights we offer in our skills course!
Libby and Brad DuPont have been married since 2003, and live in Overland Park, KS with their two kids. They enjoy a strong cup of coffee, a decent glass of wine and the fact that they laugh at each other’s jokes when no one else does. They have been part of the national leadership team for EverMore in Love since 2017. Libby currently serves as Director.
