The Redemption of Marriage

Your presence, O LORD, I seek. // Psalm 27:8

“Amen,” I whispered as I opened my mouth to receive Holy Communion. My husband knelt at my side and received the Host in his turn at our wedding Mass. Our first act together as a married couple, after making our vows and entering into the Sacrament of Matrimony on this same date sixteen years ago, was to kneel down at the Eucharistic Prayer of our wedding Mass and receive the graces of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

Beginning that day, our married life has been the intentional seeking of graces: daily family prayers, Sunday Mass every week, daily Mass when our schedule allows, Confession twice a month, regular prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. When we have slackened in our receiving of grace, our marriage has suffered.

When Jesus laid out the hard teaching on marriage in today’s Gospel (see Matthew 5:27-32), He did not expect for us to do it alone. He explained that the reason there was divorce in the Old Testament was because of their hard hearts (see Matthew 19:8). They were living after the fall and before Jesus died for our sins and sent the Holy Spirit to fill us with grace.

In this time of the Holy Spirit, where the seven Sacraments are a part of our daily lives, we can live out marriage as we were meant to in the beginning. As Pope Saint John Paul II wrote in his work on the theology of the body, Christ wants us to “rediscover the lost fullness of [our] humanity and want to regain it” in which we live out marriage according to God’s plan in mutual self-giving, in love and respect, as a communion of persons imaging the love of the Trinity (source).

Sister, the Lord wants you to know the freedom of living in His sacramental life. Wherever you are in your vocation, you cannot live His call without the help of the Sacraments. Receive them whenever you can. He hangs on the Cross, blood pouring from His wounds, asking us to step under the flow of His sacrificial love and accept the grace to live redeemed marriages.