Commandments Toward Communion
Building from Made for Communion, What is love? Revisited with AI, others from this series on Love, and from reflection on Marriage and Theology of the Body.
In praying about the Theology of the Body, I was struck by a repeated line from Scripture, "a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh."(Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:8, Ephesians 5:31). It made me realize that often we don't recognize the sacredness of marriage and family, not only to society but to each other. As we have previously discussed, love is the act of the will which brings communion. Thus, marriage is understood properly as the forming and maintaining of wholistic interpersonal communion, which results in the family.
First, we must understand how to begin, by understanding the process. When we think of marriage, sometimes we only think of companionship, starting a family, or a wedding day. However, these fall immensely short of describing the reality of marriage. Even in the Theology of the Body, we can get lost in thinking primarily about the proper integration of conjugal physicality and only briefly on the whole picture. In truth, when we begin dating we are both learning and discerning. We are learning what it means to be in a broad-spectrum unity and discerning whether a broad-spectrum unity with this particular member of the opposite sex is the will of God, i.e. that what God has made in each other is capable of good, lasting, and holy communion. Naturally, there will be instances where our approach is inadequate and so we must better learn, or simply that given the reality of each other, a communion is not easily well-formed, where love is not at least in simple ways, easily exchanged. Still, if communion is being established and marriage is becoming clearer, brighter, and whole as opposed to grimmer and shallower, then engagement can be understood as a promise to prepare for the full reality of human interpersonal communion.
Next, on the wedding day, the promise of love's full definition is given. Real love does not give up, and real communion does not decrease or cease apart from death. To truly give oneself fully, it must begin not with sex, but with discernment because one communicates in a wholistic way, "I am yours and I give my life to you" as opposed to "I am taking pleasure from your beauty, convenience, and/or wandering from conscience". Reserving sex for marriage is not a sacrifice so much as the choice to not commit sacrilege or to participate in a nuptial act only for a would-be therapeutic end (since it is falsehood it falls short of its positive therapeutic effect, because rather than being a communication and expression of love, itis a situation of use and subsequent greater realization of the loneliness that concurrently was). Mention of this is necessary for pastoral reasons, but ideally would not be discussed at this point. So since, true, authentic, honest love conforms to this proper order, one gives the highest human promise i.e. to will not only partial and proximate goods of the other with circumstantial and conditional range, but fully and always without exception into full communion until it is ended only by death, the only unwilled reality which has such a power.
Finally, the fullness of interpersonal is not truly full until every aspect of the one is joined to the other. In this way not only the joining of accidental realities of a person like finances and living space (as significant as they are in the details of life) but the joining of their bodies, which themself are temples of God and sacraments of the person. The conjugal act has the sacramental power in itself to form enduring communion (1 Corinthians 6:16-19). As such, it is a source of further communion for the married couple and its reality helps give rise to its type, which is promised in the course of the wedding celebration i.e. the fullness of communion. Since the conjugal act is not firstly about a therapeutic end but one of communion when it is truly accomplished it serves as an opportunity to bring life not only to the couple by way of communion, but to the world in the form of children. At the moment of conception, another person becomes present in the marital relationship, and the new state of the broader reality is what we mean by family. The purpose of the marriage, of the promises made, and of the communion then changes, it becomes a communion of formation since not only is the child formed biologically from that point on and spiritually by God at the moment of creation, but more importantly in that that soul and mind be formed in the practice of the Christian life and in love that such a child knows what it means to be in communion, what it means to choose it, how to choose it well, and to know what this means with respect to God. This communion takes precedence over the parent-child relationship because it is a higher communion with greater importance since it is sacramental and foundational to society.
In conclusion, when we discuss marriage let it not just be thought of as a paper from the government, an opportunity to pay fewer taxes, to make a relationship socially acceptable, or an opportunity to simply say wife or husband, but as family and sacrament which is formed by bodily and psychological complementarity, in freedom, through faithfulness, with favor bringing life to children and the couple, in the fullness of consent which is authentic, binding promise, and ideally in the context of relationships with God. Every aspect of the person should be altered via joining into a full communion. Let us also recognize not only its beauty but significance in the formation and health of the broader human family known as society. Since the family is the microcosm of society it should be protected and cherished above any other material good. It is well known that problems in the family bring problems to the society by way of the hurting individual.
