One of the secrets to a fulfilling marriage is to make your marriage the center of your life. Not work. Not friends. Not your family of origin.
What does that look like?
In this week's Gospel, Jesus calls to Simon, Andrew, James, and John, telling them to follow him, because "the time of fulfillment is at hand." The men abandon their work, their families, their friends and employees, to follow Jesus.
When Simon, Andrew, James, and John leave their work and their families to follow Jesus, they represent the importance of re-ordering our lives to be centered on the most important relationship we can have. For them, it was God in the presence of Jesus. For us, as Christians, it is God in the sacramental relationship that is our marriage.
It is no easy task to put our relationships before our work. Work is central to almost all human lives. Whether we labor on a farm, stare at a computer in an office, travel around delivering goods, teach in a classroom, or any of myriad other activities, we work to support ourselves and our families. Because we must work, work is often a point of contention in marriages.
Is your spouse more important than your work? We've all read or watched cautionary tales about men and women whose marriages suffer when work life becomes more important than home life.
But overwork is not the only way we can put work ahead of our spouses. A few years ago we read Pope Francis's 2016 essay Amoris Laetitia (On the Joy of Love"). In one passage, the Pope talks about the need for kindness in the home, expressed in everyday courtesies. It led Mark to reflect on how blunt and sharp he often was in speaking "honestly" to Dawna. He thought: "I would never speak to a colleague or staff in such a tone. Why do I speak to my wife that way?"
We are also called to put our marriage ahead of our families of origin. Our families are often important sources of emotional and financial support, sounding boards, and sources of collective wisdom. But our closeness to our families can be a problem when we share with them secrets we may keep from our spouse, or use them as confidential sounding boards or confidants to whom we can vent about the things we don't like but aren't willing to address directly with our spouses. Keeping appropriate boundaries is crucial.
And no family is perfect. We carry into our marriages habits, and patterns of behavior that may have worked with our parents and siblings but do not mesh well with our spouse. Both partners often need to retrain themselves to new habits, forms of communication, and patterns of behavior that are appropriate to our spouse, however hard that may be.
When Simon, Andrew, James, and John leave their work and their families to follow Jesus, they represent the importance of re-ordering our lives to be centered on the most important relationship we can have. For them, it was God in the presence of Jesus. For us, as Christians, it is God in the sacramental relationship that is our marriage.
Over the past few years, we have lost family and friends to cancer, to SIDS, to drug overdoses, and to mental illness. We have grieved with their loved ones, who have been devastated. It has become a stark reminder to us that we never knows how long we have together to make one another feel loved. It is a reminder to put our relationships front and center, so we can make the best use of the time we have left.
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