Love only really exists in the form of a gift. When you give it away, it grows. When you hoard it or hide it, it stagnates or diminishes.
The sacrament of marriage is intended to be an ongoing giving away of yourself. Do you put everything you have at the service of your vocation? Or do you withhold some of yourself?
In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus offers his disciples the story of a man leaving on a journey who divides his available capital into eight parts, giving five parts to one servant, two to another and one to the third. When he returns after a long time, he finds that the first two servants have invested his money and doubled its value; the third had buried it so that none of it would be lost. The man invites the first two servants “to share in his joy” but casts out the third servant.
The word in the original Greek gospel for the money he gives them is talent, which refers to a specific measure of gold or silver by weight. And it’s a lot of money, equivalent to more than 10 years wages for a common laborer. Over the years--in part because of its use in this parable--the word “talent” stopped referring to a specific unit of wealth and came to refer to natural abilities and aptitudes, mental endowments, physical attributes and artistic flair.
In Christian teaching, all such talents ultimately derive from God. What are your talents? Time? Wealth? Energy? Attention? Intellect? Organizational skills? Because they come ultimately from God, they are meant to become gifts. When you give them away, they grow. If you try to keep them for yourself, in the manner of the third servant, they become stagnant. It isn’t easy to double your investment, though. It takes a great deal of work and thought and attention.
This parable is about vocation, and can be applied to the work of marriage. Something is entrusted to you, and you work to grow it so that you can return it as more than it is. The Christian ideal of the marital vocation is that each spouse entrusts themselves fully to the other, and in so doing their love grows beyond what each initially invested.
The vocation of marriage consists of giving the attention, and thought, and hard work needed to return your spouse's love twofold.
And notice that the two servants are unequal. The master has granted one five portions and the other only two. So it is with most marriages. We enter into relationships with imperfect people--just as they have!--and then we work for the rest of our lives to love one another ever more perfectly. What if one has more to give than the other? As long as each is giving their all, love grows.
We seek to avoid being (or becoming) the servant who buried his talents. This is the spouse who fears to risk, who worries about whether they are getting as much as they give, and who is in the marriage not to work at making it better but to preserve it in the ways it serves them.
And what if one spouse is holding back? It’s probably time for marital counseling. Not only so they can learn what is holding them back, but so you can explore why you feel they aren’t giving enough.
Bishop Robert Barron has said that “God only exists in gift form.” The same thing is true of marital love.
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