Introduction

When engaged couples approach Catholic priests about getting married, many priests have taken to asking them why they want to get married in the Church. When couples explain that they love each other, or that they want to be together forever, the priests explain that that’s no reason to be married in the Church. A secular marriage would do quite well. Bishop Robert Barron has written that couples are ready to marry in the Church when they realize that “marriage is, as much as the priesthood of a priest, a vocation, a sacred calling.”

 

All over the world, Catholic parishes offer pre-Cana counseling, workshops or classes that are required of couples before they get married. The Church wants to make sure that these young couples understand what they are getting into: not just a lifelong commitment to companionship come hell or high water, but a new kind of relationship with God.

 

When couples come together and sacramentally vow “I marry you” to one another, they initiate a process that the Church teaches is both spiritually profound, objectively real, and life-long. Falling out of love, treating one another badly, adultery, divorce--none of these end a sacramental marriage.

 

But they do produce very real suffering. Marriage can be a heaven or a hell, but most often it is a purgatory, a process through which we have an opportunity to become better and better versions of ourselves by taking advantage of the opportunities that marriage offers, and overcoming the obstacles it inevitably sets before us.

 

Married life is often compared to a path or journey we undertake. In his encyclical Amoris Laetitia, for example, Pope Francis calls marriage “a dynamic path to personal development and fulfillment” and John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley that in both marriages and journeys “the certain way to be wrong is to think that you control it.”  The journey metaphor is attractive because many of its entailments resonate strongly with couples making that journey. A journey is not its destination but an action; it is people moving forward toward a destination. A journey has uphill struggles that test our strength and ability to work as a team, obstacles like fallen trees and rock slide calamities that we overcome (or that bury us), and sometimes, hopefully often, smooth roads we traverse happily side by side.

 

This book looks at marriage as a journey toward heaven. We take as our organizing model Dante's great poem about a journey from Hell through Purgatory into Heaven. Dante finds himself in the middle of his life lost in a great, dark wood, hounded by three beasts representing his inclinations to sin. As he seeks to find his way he is given a guide--the poet Virgil--and a vision of unselfish love--Beatrice. But to find his way to grace and redemption, he must first plunge into the depths of Hell and confront the consequences of destructive behavior. Only then can he ascend the mountain of Purgatory and then travel through the layers of heaven to reach his vision, and the source of love itself.

 

As this brief description suggests, Dante was a great believer in symbolism. He believed that all stories had many dimensions, and religious stories, such as those in the Bible, had at least four levels of meaning. So it is with our book.

 

At one level, marriage is a real process of growth and transformation over time, and as an emotional attachment between two people. Emotionally, physically and economically it really can be a heaven or a hell.

 

At another level, both Dante's poem and this book are about the process of becoming good, of eliminating the self-destructive habits stemming from our pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust, and replacing them with habits of humility, kindness, gentleness, diligence, generosity, sacrifice and self-control. Eventually, we move beyond overcoming our self-destructive behaviors to bring into our marriage the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope and love, so that we can live lives of joy.

 

At still a higher level, this book is informed by a theological truth: that marriage is sacramental, that marriage can, when practiced genuinely, infuse your lives with sacramental grace, and bring you and your spouse closer to God.

 

The point of this book, however, is not to offer a set of abstract ideas or theoretical models, but to offer a set of practical activities to support, comfort and inspire change in every family that experiences difficulties or suffering, by describing the goals and pathways for a successful marital journey. 

 

Marriage is hard work. This book will not teach you how to make it easier. Rather, this book will offer you one possible path for working smarter, not harder, to create better marriages. It will also offer concrete tools for helping you along that path. In addition, we hope it will offer you some insight into why marriage might be worth that much work. In this, we follow the call of Pope Francis to “find the right language, arguments and forms of witness that can help us reach the hearts of young people, appealing to their capacity for generosity, commitment, love and even heroism, and in this way inviting them to take up the challenge of marriage with enthusiasm and courage.”

 

Who are we to invite you on such a journey?

 

I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, with 35 years of practical experience in three countries. I am a mother of four grown children that I homeschooled. I have an MEd from the  University of Virginia and a BA from UCLA.  My husband, co-parent, and co-author is a college professor with a PhD from Brown University, an MA from the Catholic University of America, and a  BA from UCLA. We have been married for more than 40 years, living in 7 states and 4 countries. We spent 5 years on a marriage preparation team introducing engaged couples to Catholic Marriage, as well as having offered countless workshops on Catholic marriage.

 

We write as fellow sojourners on the marital journey. We have looked down into the abyss and seen our marriage nearly end in disaster. We have struggled up through purgatory seeking to shed the flaws and habits that impede our path. The section on heavenly marriage--well that is aspirational for us, as well as our fellow travellers reading this book.

 

Our guide along the way is the marital teachings of the Catholic church. The Church is a seriously flawed institution, and always has been, but that’s a discussion for a different time and place. Here, we want to focus on the teachings and traditions of the Catholic church, ancient and modern. We have studied many religions and wisdom traditions over our years together: Hinduism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, as well as other liturgical and non-liturgical forms of Christianity. I was raised in a protestant home, as a Congregationalist, but found an astonishing treasure house of Christian wisdom and teaching in the Catholic church. My husband was raised Catholic but lapsed. He returned to the Church because his effort to improvise his marriage on an ad hoc basis was unfruitful and unfulfilling. Like Dante, he needed a guide.

 

What is it that the Church teaches?

 

The essence of Christian teaching is that the fundamental principle of life is love. Love is a complicated word in English, overflowing with a surfeit of meanings: we can love food, sex, children, pets, friends, spouses, and even humankind, yet mean something different each time. In saying that God is love, however, the Church has a very specific definition, expressed in many ways over centuries but most succinctly put by St. Thomas Aquinas some 900 years ago: "Love is willing the good of the other, as other." (We’ll come back to this definition again and throughout this book.)

 

Love, in other words, involves seeing others as fully developed and valuable persons--people who are each the star of their own story, never just a player in your story. It means wanting what is best for them even when it is not what you want for them.

 

At the heart of Christianity is an astonishing claim: that God is a relationship.  God consists of three persons: a lover (usually called the Father by Christians), giving himself completely to a beloved (“the Son”), who fully gives himself back, and a generative living person that “proceeds from” their complete self-giving to one another (the Holy Spirit). An individual God can love his or her creation, but only a God that is a relationship can be love. In Christian teaching, marriage is likewise a relationship between three persons: it is a covenant between a husband and wife and God, whose love and grace are to serve as a guarantor of the marriage.

 

Worship, in this Christian tradition, consists not of following laws or performing ceremonies (although we certainly do these things), it is about becoming more and more like God by entering into relationships. We are called to become like God by putting aside our desire to live for ourselves and to seek the good of others. Marriage is a vocation, a life's work. At one level, this refers to the physical and economic work of marriage: making a living, contributing to society and, if blessed with children, raising them and providing for them so that they have an opportunity to live greater lives than ours. At another level, marriage is a spiritual work, a way to become more loving by giving you someone specific on whom to practice loving the other as other. At yet another level, the marriage is sacramental, a channel of spiritual strength.

 

In a nutshell, marriage is intended as a process in which you perfect yourself by having a spouse whose needs you continually struggle to put ahead of your own. Ideally, with each spouse giving themselves fully to the other, both feel loved, fulfilled and joyful. Alas, while most marriages sometimes hit those heights, we all struggle to maintain the altitude. Real marriages tend to rise and plunge like roller-coasters, and require a genuine commitment to get through the low points and climb back to the heights. In Christian teaching, what gets one through the down times is grace, the free gift of spiritual strength that God mysteriously grants us at our times of greatest need.

 

We have travelled the world, and we have lived extended periods in Egypt, India and Luxembourg.  We have friends with great marriages who are Hindu, Muslim, Coptic, Orthodox and various Protestant denominations of Christian. Our focus in this book has been on Catholic teachings about marriage because these are the ideas and concepts that served as guides and signposts and sometimes flashing warning signals in our own marriage, which as of this writing has lasted for thirty-nine years. This book could prove profitable for any marriage between any spouse of any faith including agnostics and atheists. Much of the advice comes from my education and training as a marriage and family therapist, and from empirical research into successful marriages. But it is unapologetically written from a Catholic Christian perspective.

 

Our marriage is not perfect. Imperfect people cannot create a perfect marriage. But marriage can help perfect people, like a crucible burning off the impurities. Great journeys are learning  experiences.  What makes a marriage great is how the spouses learn and change along the way.