by Fr. Knick and Sandie Knickerbocker
June 3, 2016
In Chapter 4 of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis' new Apostolic Exhortation, he writes about "Love in Marriage." Seeing marriage as a "Covenant of Mercy" is an appropriate description of his understanding of love in marriage, especially in this Jubilee Year of Mercy. In this article are some reflections on the Pope's teaching that we think are especially significant for married couples and the Church and then reflections on some implications and extensions of the Pope's teaching.
The Pope begins the chapter with a lengthy exposition of St. Paul's great teaching on love in I Cor. 13 (paragraphs 89-119). This is a welcome beginning, since marriage and family are the primary contexts in which we learn to receive and give love and in which we can be most hurt by a lack of love. The remainder of this chapter is further commentary on St. Paul's teaching on love.
In marriage it is necessary both to give and to receive love. To do this we must be willing to receive God's love for us and know in this receiving that He also loves others. This means we must be willing to receive God's forgiveness and allow ourselves to be the conduit of God's forgiveness of others (107, 108). Giving and receiving love means seeing others and ourselves with the eyes of God (96) — from the inside out. If this is to happen, others must reveal themselves to us, and we must be willing to receive that revelation. When we are open to the revelation of another person, we are also revealing ourselves to that person. This is so because we are created in the image of God, who is a Trinity of Persons. Each Person of the Trinity reveals Himself to the other Persons of the Trinity and receives the revelation of the other Persons. When we become the willing subjects of God's revelation of Himself to us, we also reveal ourselves to God. We have the capacity to be the willing subjects (receivers) of revelation or to decline such revelation. There is no revelation without a subject to receive it. For there to be the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Incarnation, Mary had to be the willing subject of that revelation.
Husbands and wives, in their love for each other, continually reveal themselves to each other in their marital covenant of mercy. This self-revelation includes the nuptial act, open to life, which brings children into this world, children who are the fruit of this marital covenant of mercy. Not only are husband and wife the icon of the relationship of Christ and His Church but also husband, wife, and child are the icon of the Holy Trinity and the Holy Family of Bethlehem and Nazareth. Father, mother, and child are meant to participate with the Holy Family in the perfect triune love who is God Himself.
We become willing subjects of revelation by living the virtue of humility (98). Humility means forgetting about myself in order to love others for their own sakes, and, in so doing, loving myself in the proper virtuous way. Humility means being able to rejoice in the good of others (109). A husband and wife rejoice in the unique gifts God has given each one of them, and a mother and father rejoice in the unique gifts God has given each of their children. Parents help their children see God's unfolding plan for their lives and never try to contradict that plan by saying, "This is not what I had planned for you."
Humility leads to joy in marriage and family life. Joy is distinguished from pleasure, which can be good in itself but which can come and go. Joy is being taken out of ourselves into the Triune love-life of God and His plans for us and the lives of others. When this occurs, we lose ourselves to find ourselves as we truly are in God's eyes. Humility and joy join as fruits of God's love for us and of His love for others through us.
Love, forgiveness, humility, and joy are all aspects of God's mercy, which we should find first in the family. To receive this bounty of mercy, all we must do is ask for it in the language of repentance for trying to make ourselves into someone we are not. Repentance means recognizing we are on a journey and are somewhere between who we have made ourselves by our sin and who we will become when we are fully the person God wants us to be, a person always intended by God and now redeemed by Him who saves us to become who we really are.
In marriage and family we have the primary locus of this bountiful mercy of God's love. In marriage and family we are bound in a covenant of mercy that is the domestic Church, the Church in the home, the primary unit of the parish Church. Unlike other Christian communions, the Catholic Church counts its membership by families, those primary communities bound to the Triune God in His covenant of mercy.
What are some possible implications and extensions of the teaching of Pope Francis on marriage and family? What we say here can be regarded as our private opinions. We believe that what we say does not contradict Church teaching about marriage and family but extends it in a fruitful way.
Pope Francis, in his exposition of I Corinthians 13, writes about St. Paul's teaching that "love hopes all things." He writes: "Here hope comes more fully into its own, for it embraces the certainty of life after death. Each person, with all his or her failings, is called to the fullness of life in heaven. There, fully transformed by Christ's resurrection, every weakness, darkness and infirmity will pass away. There the person's true being will shine forth in all its goodness and beauty" (#117). Furthermore, the Pope says that "when a man and a woman celebrate the sacrament of marriage, God is, as it were, 'mirrored' in them; he impresses in them his own features and the indelible character of his love. Marriage is the icon of God's love for us. Indeed, God is also communion: the three Persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit live eternally in perfect union. And this is precisely the mystery of marriage: God makes of the two spouses one single existence" (121). He speaks of married love as "a dynamic process..., one which advances gradually with the progressive integration of the gifts of God" (122, quoting St. John Paul II). Pope Francis teaches that "after the love that unites us to God, conjugal love is the 'greatest form of friendship' (St. Thomas Aquinas). It is a union possessing all the traits of a good friendship: concern for the good of the other, reciprocity, intimacy, warmth, stability and the resemblance born of a shared life. Marriage joins to all this an indissoluble exclusivity expressed in the stable commitment to share and shape the whole of life. Let us be honest and acknowledge the signs that this is the case. Lovers do not see their relationship as merely temporary" (123).
However, Pope Francis then says that "A love that is weak or infirm, incapable of accepting marriage as a challenge to be taken up and fought for, reborn, renewed and reinvented until death, cannot sustain a great commitment" (124). Our question is: "Why does this marital commitment end at death?" Jesus teaches that in heaven we will neither marry nor be given in marriage (Mt. 22:30), but He does not say it will be as though we had never married. We talk much today about divorce, annulment, remarriage, communion for the divorced, and even so-called same-sex marriage. But, what about a marriage on earth that reaches the fullness of its life in heaven? Isn't this in keeping with what Pope Francis teaches about each person being called to the fullness of life in heaven, where the person's true being will shine forth in all its goodness and beauty? Isn't this in keeping with his teaching that God is "mirrored" in husband and wife, in whom God impresses his own features and the indelible character of his love? Isn't this in keeping with the Pope's teaching that God makes of the husband and wife "one single existence"? Isn't this in keeping with his teaching that in marriage husband and wife are joined in "an indissoluble exclusivity"? And, isn't this in keeping with his teaching that "lovers do not see their relationship as merely temporary"? What about marriage as a covenant of mercy that is perfected in eternity? We live our married lives here in the faith and hope that the perfection of our married love will be found in heaven.