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3b. When your spouse does these annoying things, how, specifically, will you change your behavior to more adequately reflect your chosen motto? (For example: “How can I respond more lovingly when my wife is late?”)
4. We all hold back from our mates. What do you hold back? How will God’s grace and the virtues you identified help you overcome this selfishness? How will you motivate yourself to give more generously to your mate?
5. What steps must you take so that your work life, parenting life, and personal life can more adequately reflect your personal motto? (For example: take a parenting class, go on a couples’ retreat, do more spiritual reading, go to daily Mass, get additional job training, etc.) What role would you like your spouse to play in helping you achieve these goals?
6. What goals or accomplishments do you believe God is asking you to pursue at this time in your life? (Think of those most heartfelt desires that you have dismissed as silly but somehow won’t go away.) What role would you like your spouse to play in helping you achieve these goals?
Part Two: Your Partnership
Directions: You and your mate should now share and discuss your answers to Part One. During this discussion, keep in mind that your mate has arrived at her answers to Part One through prayerful discernment. Her answers reflect her genuine beliefs about the identity God is making her responsible for fulfilling. This identity may involve things you don’t appreciate, think are silly, or don’t like; but God didn’t ask your opinion when he gave your mate this mission. He only demands that you be faithful to the promises you made in your marriage and help your partner fulfill her identity. Remember, your mate may not make it without you, but you are responsible to God to make certain she makes it with you.
Discuss: In order to become the partner God asks you to be to your mate, what specific actions must you take, what skills must you develop, or what choices must you make in your daily life? What must you do to increase your mate’s chances of fulfilling his identity in Christ?
Part Three: A Promise
Take turns pledging the following:
[Say your partner’s name] I genuinely respect the person you are, and the person God wants you to be. To that end, I promise that I will work to see the good in the things you value, especially when I don’t understand. I will never say that the dreams, goals, or values God has placed in your heart are silly or unworthy of my time and attention. I promise to be the most important influence in your life, second only to our Savior, Jesus Christ, because I love and honor who you are and who God is calling you to become. I promise that I will love you and support you with all of my life, all the days of my life. And I promise that with the Lord’s help, I will be your best hope for arriving, properly attired, at the heavenly banquet.
Conclusion
In this chapter, you discovered that the phrase “the two shall become one” is more than mere poetry. It is a promise. God wants to use your marriage to restore the unity that existed at the beginning of time between Adam and Eve, and to show the world that men and women are not meant to be enemies or mysteries to one another, but true, intimate helpmates for each other. Further, he wants to unite you in a mission that will bring his face to the world in ways only you and your spouse can, and to empower your marriage to be a blessing to everyone who encounters you. And by committing your lives to all of this, God plans to give you the grace each of you needs to help each other become everything you were created to be in this life and to enable each other to get to heaven in the next! Clearly, God is giving you a great deal to celebrate!
But wait! There’s more!
In the next chapter, we’ll explore the second blessing God wants to give you, a blessing that will be a cause for celebration for generations — literally — to come; the blessing that accompany a life-giving love.
Chapter 3
The Celebration Continues
A Life-Giving Love
In the last chapter, you discovered that as married couples commit to living out the free, total, faithful, and fruitful love that comes from God’s own heart, he gives them two special blessings to celebrate throughout their lives; an incredible Christian union and a life-giving love. So far, we’ve looked at the ways marital grace empowers you to experience an uncommon degree of unity between you and your mate by winning the Battle of the Sexes and creating shared meaning by growing together in your Christian identities.
Don’t Stop the Party
But, as evidenced by our abundance of feast days, Catholics love a party. So naturally, there is still a second celebration to which all Catholic couples are invited: the celebration of a life-giving love. These two goals of marriage — unity and procreativity — are really inseparable from each other and feed into one another. A true, unifying love must also be a life-giving love (and vice versa), not just metaphorically, but literally, in the procreative sense. Children represent the miraculous unity between a husband and wife like nothing else.
In his Letter to Families, St. John Paul the Great told us:
Rather than closing [spouses] up in themselves, [a couple’s unity] opens them towards new life, towards a new person. As parents, they will be capable of giving life to a being like themselves, not only bone of their bones and flesh of their flesh … but an image and likeness of God — a person. (n. 8)
Of course, Jesus himself said that anyone who welcomes a little child welcomes him (Mt 18:5). Spouses who truly love each other and love our Lord will welcome the children he wants to give them.
This is a timely message. Challenging the low birth rates that are causing social problems throughout Europe, Pope Francis asserted, “In a world often marked by egoism, a large family is a school of solidarity and of mission that’s of benefit to the entire society” (comments to the National Association of Large Families, 2014).
Over the years, certain people have taken a lot of swings at what they think is “the Church’s position” on sex and procreation. Unfortunately, these people are often too blinded by their own ignorance to see that what they are swinging at isn’t the Church’s teaching at all, but rather a Monty Pythonized (cf. The Meaning of Life), pop-culture bastardization of Church teaching. Later on, we’ll look at how you can experience a truly joyful, intimate, soulful sexual life with your spouse. For now, we want to simply explore a few brief points about how welcoming children as a gift from the Lord can help you celebrate the fullness of your marriage.
Celebrating the Joy of Creative Love
“Because God is a lover, he is also a creator” (Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine). God is love, so part of his very nature is to create new things to be loved. This is why God seems to be endlessly fascinated with creating new things. It gives him more to love.
God especially loves to create people. As the Church tells us in the Vatican Council II
