Modernity's New Drink: Marriage on the Rocks
Hell is up to its old tricks again. It has pulled out its tried and true strategy of attacking the sacrament of marriage. Not that it is a drink that hasn’t worked before, but it seems to be enjoying unparalleled success in the past 50 years. It doesn’t take a genius to know that marriage and families collapse once you release the unfettered sexual appetite to rule as a god. But seeing how effective that has been, hell’s tacticians have taken their strategy one step further. It has successfully created a cancel culture giddy to neuter the identities of man and woman itself. This androgynous dream has taken hell’s hopes of success beyond their wildest expectations. Never could it have it expected such frenzied embrace from modernity. Yes, its elites; but its ordinary masses as well. But let us linger a moment on the glories of marriage, one of God’s most exquisite natural gifts. Hell knows well the old scholastic adage, corruptio optimi pessima. (the best corrupts the worst).
Countless millions of tourists visit the great capitals of Europe each year delighting in places such as Paris, Rome, London, Prague and Madrid. They marvel at how great cities were built and adorned in such splendor. But the greatest builders are not the ones whom history records as architects of cities or heroic monuments. The greatest builders are mothers and fathers. The cities they build are families, and these cities dwarf the glories of Paris and Rome. For while the Coliseum and Buckingham Palace are worthy of tourists’ admiration, their inert grandeur cannot match home and hearth, the lively songs of children and the tender embraces of their parents. Therein lies a different kind of grandeur, a grandeur more essential to the grandeur of man. As Samuel Johnson remarked, “The whole purpose of life is to be happy at home.”
The nuptial bond solemnly joins man and woman in a pact fashioned in paradise. But the transformation of man and woman into husband and wife is only the beginning, like the rosebud before it is a rose. The full flowering of marriage’s purpose is not seen till husband and wife become father and mother. This is when contract bursts into melody, a page of musical notes become symphonic sounds, a palette’s paints are put to canvas and, voila, an artist’s masterpiece. Each newly minted married couple receive an august commission from Almighty God in the holy sacrament of Matrimony. In the words of Fr. Gerald Vann, “they become ministers of God’s omnipotence in making immortal beings”. This startling mandate shimmers with grave obligations which God lays upon a couple’s shoulders, promising the divine assistance of grace making their fulfillment possible.
Besides the already heavy weight of wedded love there is the burden of the world’s provocative deceptions. They entice with the hoary lies once offered in the Garden of Eden. Rather than rest in the designs of Almighty God, husband and wife are lured with the tantalizing offer, “ye shall be as gods.” In the memorable words of Whittaker Chambers, they would trade Almighty God to become Almighty Man. Rather than “increase and multiply”, the world preaches “be yourself”. Beneath this propaganda large sprawling families sink into secularity’s proper 1.2 children boutique units. No sooner is this fateful bargain sealed than a cascade of lies floods the mind. Like Pandora’s Box a series of cruel demons fly out. Unlike Pandora’s Box nothing is left but more lies. Wickedness possesses its ineluctable logic.
The first fatality is love itself… The world whispers the tall tale that marriage is after all for “luv.”. But bubbling beneath the surface of this lie is love’s counterfeit. It is drained of the sacrifice which defines its nobility and descends into fakery. It is matter of a small step to miss that God is the author love’s first enchantments, intimations of a grander adventure to follow. Every Sacrament is a sharing in the cosmos- shaking love of Calvary. Marriage is no different. The initial swoons of courtship are only preparations for the formidable tasks of Holy Matrimony. All the movements of romance are to be placed in the service of marriage’s highest purpose – the procreation of the human race. Only here can be found marriage’s towering beauty. Love of two placed at the service of One who alone is Love. When this logic of heaven becomes the daily motions of married love then husband and wife find themselves, in the words of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poet, Thomas Traherne, “awake in heaven”. The sacrifices will be aplenty, but the joys will outnumber them.
Within the folds of those graces and their corresponding crosses, the married couple come face to face with one of the world’s other titillating lies: the cult of the self. This idol has not only strangled marriage and the family but has left culture a tomb for the carcasses of man totally devoted to Man. Since marriage demands the selfless oblation to the other, the looming divinized Self always lurks as a foil. It dares replace “till death do us part” with “until the feeling is gone.” Marriage must stand as a heroic standard against this flattened caricature of love. It bids husband and wife leave the isolation of the sovereign Self so that the “two become one flesh.” All the joys of the one is now the joys of both. Nothing is any longer mine or yours, but ours. All the while a distinction of roles remain, just as does the distinction of sexes. In the words of Pius XI in his ode to marriage, Casti Connubii, “God did not take Eve from Adam’s head that she might be his master, nor did he take him from his heel, that she might be his slave. He takes her from his side, beneath his heart, that she be his partner.” The wife exercises the leadership of love, always softening her husband’s tendency to brute virility. Husbands, in their turn, exercise the leadership of strength steeling tenderness when necessary, curbing sentimentality when needed.
The graces of marriage must weather the tempests of immanentism: that conviction of modernity that the whole of life is bound by the walls of this physical world and its chronological time. It is impervious to the truth that man bears the weight of eternity upon his shoulders. No reminder of that rings more loudly than in the graces of marriage. Eternity is always tapping at the door of the souls of husbands and wives as the words of the priest rings ever in their ears, “till death do ye part.” It raises the couples love out of the frictions and tribulations of the trifling moment. Their eternal pledge miniaturizes their woes for they see all of them sub aeternitatis. God’s perspective becomes their own.
With each new child comes an opportunity to share in the abundance of God. Modernity has fallen in love with carefully calculated limits, shrinking the human person and leaving him without the dignity God intended. With each settlement for less, man finds himself less a man.. In the words of St. John of the Cross, “Outside of God, everything is small.” Could this be the point of Johnathan Swift ‘s parable, Gulliver’s Travels? This hail and tall-standing man is immobilized by hundreds of little men restraining him with a thousand strings. Alas, the plight of Modern Man, held captive by the thousand strings of serial arousals and endless superficialities. The Sacrament of Matrimony confronts stunted Modern Man with the vision of the soaring Christian Man, the man made in the imago et similtudo Dei.
Every Catholic sanctuary should be a fortress against modernity’s mendacities. Not so any longer. With great enthusiasm not a few priests have permitted marriage’s solemnity to be debased into a billboard for modernity’s beguilements. Absent is the ancient Catholic marriage ritual’s exhortatio, “you are about to enter into a union which is most sacred and most serious, a union which was established by God Himself.” After this first sentence, the exhortatio goes on to declare at three other times that their union is “most serious.” No doubt can remain in even the most dimwitted. Yet, even if the priest struggles to articulate such gravitas, it is belied by the couple’s choice of non-sacral music injecting a sinking frivolity. Usually the music wins out. This burial of the marriage ceremony in sentimental ooze only serves to raise the white flag of surrender to the zeitgeist’s sterility.
Each man must face God in final judgment. To husbands and wives, He will ask them to show Him the cities they have built. The cities of their families teeming with children bathed in the light of mothers and fathers who lit those cities with their sacrificial love. Only then will Christ smile, and say to them, now enter into the eternal City of Paradise.
October 2020
