This is the third of a series of three. Click the following for parts One, and Two.
This is the third and concluding post in our overview of the Holy Father and West’s interpretation of Christian vocation. This week we will focus on cultural renewal and the joys in matrimonial union. For those of you wondering when we get to the good stuff, this is the good stuff. Ok, but seriously, we’ll get to the first lecture soon. I just felt it important to lay a level playing ground for a wide audience. Let’s continue shall we?
Last week we said that marriage is a prophetic happening that God uses to confront sin.
To be diligent in contending with sin this means marriages must needs have a chastity and discipline all their own, and suddenly St. Paul’s exhortation to abstinence even within marriage for prayer and fasting begins to not only make sense, but almost becomes a necessary correlative of nuptial union by the virtue of the meaning of marriage as a way of contending with the sinful order.
Marriage is also supposed to bring happiness, joy, fulfillment and contentment to those called to it. To bring this happiness though, spouses must engage the disciplines of marriage rightly and order themselves towards these disciplines with all loving diligence.
The joy found in proper nuptial union is the most powerful weapon against the dis-ordered state of the world we find ourselves in, but we can only find this joy through the chastity that will bring us into the clarity of sacramental imagination. We can only contend with sin as married couples to the extent that we begin to see all our bodily actions as happening in God, and thus working towards fulfilling the advent of Christ more and more perfectly through growth in the loving disciplines that marriage provides.
The body has a “language” that’s meant to express God’s free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. This is exactly what spouses commit to at the altar. “Have you come here freely?” the priest asks, “to give yourselves to each other without reservation? Do you promise to be faithful until death? Do you promise to receive children lovingly from God?” Bride and groom say “yes.
This is the heart of how the Theology of the Body provides cultural renewal, through marriage, through the family, through the original nuptial meaning of the body and it’s power to manifest the advent of Christ in part, and proclaim Him until he comes.
The body says yes, when all is said and done and the sacrament of matrimony occurs. “Spouses are meant to express this same “yes” with their bodies whenever they become one flesh.” Every act of sexual union is a confirmation and renewal of wedding vows, proclaiming the fiat of the bride and groom both to Christ and each other until He comes again. The words “take you to be my wife/husband can only be fulfilled in the conjugal act,” and therefore the act itself is a “be it done unto me according to your will Oh Lord.”
Every act of conjugal unity must embody this fiat which is basically Latin shorthand for Mary’s ‘yes’ to the work and will of God. Marriage itself never justifies licentiousness or lust, it only makes room for the further growth of chastity. Marriage is a catechesis of the sexual self, in precisely a mirrored but co-equal way that celibacy is. They both work towards the same goal, and apart from either of these our bodies are in rebellion to Christ and His Lordship.
We can only contend with sin as married couples to the extent that we allow room for Christ to happen between us in terms of both physical and spiritual life. This is precisely the reason that the Church forbids contraception. If Christ cannot happen through the advent of children where it is naturally possible, then marriage is devoid of a necessary dimension of the advent of Christ between persons. Any marriage that denies the possibility of procreative power, either through adoption, or conception, or involvement with children is a marriage that is wounded by a peculiar lack of Christ.
I know that there has been lots of opinion in the last two posts, but these are the sorts of conclusions I feel we must draw at the outset if we are going to rightly begin to interpret the Theology of the Body.
A Journey with the Holy Father 