Marriage is a vocation, that is, a specific path to holiness and union with God. Holiness is a path of love, and to love means to sacrifice. And through the path of sacrifice, love and holiness, our lives actually become better.
Fr. Adam Voisin's Stuff
Marriage talk given at St. Ann's, Ancaster on April 18, 2013
When I was in the seminary, and I was a priest, we have people come and give us talks on the priesthood. And guess what? They're always priests, right? And here I am, not married, speaking to you about marriage. And I look around and I might be on the younger side here. So, safe to say. So I think, well, what do I have to offer? What's in my way? I'm in a wheelhouse of experience of marriage. And I've tried to draw on that. I don't think I'm bereft of anything worthwhile saying I think the priest has a certain inside view into marriage and virtue of our interaction with people in the confessional and counseling. And yeah, I'm the judicial vicar of the diocese. So it means I had the marriage tribunal. As I say, I spend my days, you know, if you ever come to the parish during the day, you know, weekday and I'm not here, it's because I'm in the tribunal. That's where I, that's my primary responsibility right now. So I literally spend my day hunched over at ask reading cases of failed marriages and then dealing with the people. Now this is after the divorce. There's no more chance of reconciliation and they're seeking this declaration of nullity that they may get married. I suppose again in the church. So I want to in a certain way draw on what I see there in the tribunal in those cases. And I want to draw on, I don't want to get into the nitty gritty like this isn't the how to talk. I have nothing to offer. Honestly, I don't know the tips. I don't know, you know, the skills on how to make a good marriage. That's what you have. That's not what I have. So what do I have? Well, I want to basically share kind of some basic kind of spiritual ideas and principles and apply them to marriage. And what I have particularly in mind, you know, when I see all these cases that come to the tribunal, there's a lot of them where the marriage failed because something really, really serious, right? There was abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal, mental, even sexual abuse. Sometimes one of the parties or even both will be involved in drug abuse or alcohol abuse. There can be really serious personality disorders, psychological issues. There can be infidelity, you know, really kind of big things that bring marriages to an end. That's not what I have in mind tonight. That's not what I'm addressing. One of the difficulties about speaking about marriage to people who are married is that we can speak about it in generalities, but I know that each of you hear it through your own experience of your particular marriage. And every couple here, you have a unique experience of marriage that's unique to you, you and your spouse. So to try to give advice that, you know, to a group of people such as this, it would be like a doctor trying to give all his patients one medication, right? It can't be done. But so I do want to kind of, well, take the airplane up to 30,000 feet a little bit, right? And kind of give kind of a bigger view of things. Marriage is a vocation. There's the bottom line. Marriage is a vocation as in, you know, basically right now I could just say to what father Ian said, ditto, you know, basically what we're going to get is a repeat of what he gave in the humbly. Marriage is a vocation. When I was being ordained, you know, as the day was coming closer around that time, people would say, congratulations. It's so nice that you have a vocation because we tend to equate the word vocation with priesthood or religious life. And I always thought, well, it's really nice, but all people have a vocation. God calls everybody to something. He creates us with a purpose. He created you specifically with the purpose in mind, from the very dawn of your own existence. He had something in mind for you, as he did for me, as he does for each person he creates. So he has a vocation. Marriage is among those vocations, just noble vocation. And we're going to, I'm going to conclude by reading the old ritual humbly for marriage, which is very beautiful and speaks about this in great detail. What do we mean by vocation? Vocation comes from the Latin word, vocare. And vocare is just a very simple word in Latin to call. It's the word you would use like if you called somebody from the other side of the room. There's nothing special about it. And I think, so already we have, in that one word, vocation, look at what we have. We know, remember from grammar, that in a verb, you've got a subject and an object, right? You've got the one who does the verb, the one who does the calling, and then you've got the recipient of the action, the object. Right? So we already have God the caller, and we are the ones called. So already there's this relationship established with God in the very word, vocation. So what is it for? Imagine you're in a kind of a busy street, and you hear someone yell, "Hey!" and then your name. What would you do? You'd turn, and you would look, and you would pay attention. What is this person saying to me? That's what a vocation is. It's God calling us to turn, to look to Him, to focus on Him, to hear what He wants us to hear. And the vocation is basically just a path to holiness. And what is holiness? Holiness is love. Love of God and love of neighbor, very simply, right? So vocation is a path to holiness. Holiness is the path of learning how to love, and what is love? Well as Father Ian said tonight in the humbling, and as we see at Easter, it's involved sacrifice. Jesus showed us what love looks like when He died on the cross. It involves sacrifice. So we have everything that really fits well with marriage, right? This vocation, call to holiness in married life, is learning how to love, in this learning, how to sacrifice. Now here's a principle that I think we often forget, and we don't hear a lot about. When we hear holiness, maybe we think, well, it's boring, right? Who wants to be holy, right? Because it seems like I can't do all the fun things I want to do if I'm holy, right? Like holiness just means never sinning anymore. And it kind of gets a bad rap. Holiness makes life better. There's the bottom line, holiness makes life better. It improves our lives. So that's what marriage is meant to do. It's to make us holy, to teach us how to love, that, and sacrifice that our lives may be better. I'm sure that you've been to many weddings, as I have, and you go to the reception, and eventually you get to the speeches, right? And everyone will give speeches. And then eventually the bride and the groom, the newly married couple, will get up to give their speeches. And everyone pays close attention. And they say they'll look at each other with kind of googly eyes, right? And they'll say, you know, I'm so happy that I married you, because now my life is complete. You fulfill me. You complete me. And everyone kind of ooze, and we are so nice, right? I'm always a little concerned when I hear that, I'll be honest. What is the person saying when the person says, I'm happy that I married you because you complete me? Isn't it the exact opposite of what it really is, right? Here's a real problem, I think, in the way a lot of people go in to marriage these days. They see it as this relationship in which they're completed, they're fulfilled by another person. So you have two people going into a marriage like this. It's doomed to fail from the beginning, because two people can't live forever like that. Eventually they discover, you know, as Father Ian pointed out right after a week or two, that they're not perfect, right? And it becomes difficult. I would love to see the exact opposite. St. Paul, in his beautiful letter to the Ephesians, chapter five, where he talks about the relationship between husbands and wives, he begins it with a line that I think is beautiful. And it's this, husbands and wives be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. I would love to see the newly married couple get up, and I'd love to see the husband, this new husband, look to his wife and say, honey, I'm so happy I married you, because now I am committed to spending my life sacrificing for you, being subject to you, laying down my life for you because of my love for Jesus Christ. And I'd like to say the same thing. I want to sacrifice my life for you, give my life for you, and be subject to you out of my love and reverence for Jesus Christ. Now, obviously for this to happen and work, you need two people doing that, don't you? If you have only one person doing it and the other person not, then it becomes abusive, doesn't it? And we see that, I see that often enough in the cases that make their way to my desk. I was recently dealing with a couple that I was preparing for marriage. And we're talking about this idea of sacrifice for one another, laying down one's life for the sake of the other, for the other. And I can't remember which of the two piped up to say, yeah, it's so important that married couples make compromises. What do you think of that? Compromises. Compromises to me are this. When you have two competing parties with mutually exclusive interests, an interest that are competing with one another, but each is willing to give a little bit of what's theirs to get something out of the other. Is that a recipe for success? To me it's not. A compromise and a sacrifice are very different. In marriage, each spouse is to look to the interests of the other before their own. At the beginning, I said, you know, really what we're talking about here are basic principles from the Christian life, but applied to marriage in a specific way. The Christian life itself is a call to love, is a call to sacrifice, is a call to serve. All of the things you see in marriage, they're the call of really every Christian, but in marriage they're focused and they're sharpened and they're heightened and there's a greater demand because of that marital bond. So what do we hear about love and sacrifice? What do we hear about these things in scriptures? Well, one passage that we often hear at weddings, we know it well, right from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Love is patience, right? Love is kind, etc. Love does not insist on its own way. It's not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing. It rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, all things. You could underline, bold, italics, all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, even the messy catch up top. The toothpaste pushed from the wrong end of the tube, the little shaving bits in the sink. It endures all things. Now I tend to pick on the men more than the ladies because I am one and I feel it's just un-genomingly to pick on the ladies. So I typically don't, but I'll tell you, in my own experience, people often ask when the cases that come to us, they say, "Who's typically more at fault than men or the women?" I can honestly say it's about even. The cause of breakdown in marriages, it falls about halfway even, but I do pick on the men. So I feel like I'm able to, to some extent, sorry, my brothers. So it endures all things. Now remember, what I'm talking about here are normal kind of marriage. I bracket it off those cases of abuse, infidelity, all those big things. We're in the realm of the normal lives of marriage, like kind of difficult, like normal marriages that experience difficulties, right, that are all within the kind of normal parameters, garden variety, difficult things to deal with, that are just a part and parcel of two people or more living together. What else do we read in the scriptures? Well, we've already heard. Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. One of my favorite passages from St. Paul is in his letter to the Philippians, actually that letter itself, I think I'd say is probably my favorite of St. Paul. If there is, and this is from chapter two here, I think is a passage that is worthwhile spending a lot of time in personal meditation on. If there's any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, isn't that what we want, a consolation from love? Any sharing in the spirit, any compassion, any sympathy. Now remember, he's talking to Christians in general, the Christian community, but this applies, I think, very well in marriage. Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, regard others as better than yourselves. I'm not making this up, regard others as better than yourselves. Doesn't that offend our pride, our own sensibilities, right, to consider others as better than me? Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. What is love? Jesus says, no greater love as a person than this than to lay down one's life for one's friends. And we can go on and on, right, that who is the greatest, the one who serves, right? What is love? Love is service. Love is sacrifice for another. So back to that question, why do marriages fail? I hate referring to them as cases because what I read are not just cases, they're real lives of real people. Again, bracketing off those cases of where there's abuse and these kind of bigger things. There's a lot of marriages I see that fail. And I think why did this fail? There's no reason this marriage should have failed. They ran out of love, right? They had communication difficulties. I think how did that happen? How did they, like there was nothing really big you could put your finger on and say that was the problem. Nobody betrayed each other, no infidelities, no abuse, no alcohol, no drugs. What happened? And I have to wonder if they went into the marriage thinking well, this is something for me. Basically the marriage is really great because now somebody is obliged forever to cater to me, right? And guess what? Things went south and that person stopped doing that. And everything went wrong, right? I think gosh, if only they understood this, that marriage is a vocation, it's a call to holiness, that's a call to love, and that's a call to sacrifice. And if you get through that, if you persevere through this, these steps you could say this, you know, the sacrifice, the love, the holiness, it makes life better. It improves life. If nothing else, I think this is so important for us to know, also that we communicate this to those who are younger, those who are getting married. And I'm sure many of you know people, maybe sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, maybe grandchildren, who are getting married, looking at this vocation. If you have a chance to articulate this to them, you know, that's what I see my job. When couples come and they want to get married and I'm preparing them, it's not just to prepare the wedding day to make sure we get the procession right and where everyone's standing on the day, but to sort of take the blinders off and say, is this the kind of relationship you're willing to commit to? Are you willing to commit to this relationship in which you're committing to laying down your life, your preferences, your ideas, your desires for the other person? And this person you're marrying, is that person willing to do that for you? Don't want to do that and marry someone who's going to just exploit you. Are you both willing to do this for another one another? And I know that can be hard because when people are getting married, the blinders are on, right, the little, the road-shaped glasses or heart-shaped glasses are on, right? But if we can get those blinders off and say, this is what we're talking about when we talk about marriage is this kind of relationship. People will say, "Well, Father, it's not easy for me. You don't know my husband." You know, he does this or that. You know, he's, if only he would be better, if only he would A, B, and C, right? So I'll say, "Well, if he did all those things, what would you do?" How would you love him differently if he did all those things? Oh, well, I would do this and I would do that and I'd show him I love him and I'd do that. Well, then just do those things. And maybe he'll respond to your love, right? This is based on just a simple principle in the spiritual life itself. Often we say, "Well, if only I was holier, then I would do all these other things." Well, then just start doing those things and then we'll get holier, right? Sometimes we have to fake it till we make it, right? We have to, you just have to, you just have to ante up and you have to start doing it and things will work out. Listen to this line again, holiness makes life better. Why? Because when we learn how to love, when we learn, when we learn how to love, we begin to experience freedom, we begin to experience joy, a kind of freedom and a joy that are independent of our external circumstances. Isn't that what we want, right? Often we think, "Well, I can only be happy if everything around me works the way I want it to work." You know, if only this person were like that and my job were this and if this were like that, then I'll be happy. The saints show us that our happiness is independent of all of that, that there's a way to be happy in the midst even of difficult circumstances, even in a difficult marriage. Listen to this line from this little book. You can see it's short and small, but powerful. It's by Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom. I'll put a link on my website, FatherAdamVoicein.com. You can just Google my name, you'll find it. And if you don't know how to spell the name, look at the bullet and it's there. If you just Google me, I'll try to remember to put it there. If you scroll down, it is somewhere there but I'll put it up at the top. So he's making this case that our happiness, our interior freedom is independent of our external circumstances. Listen to this line. "People who haven't learned to love will always feel like victims. People who haven't learned to love will always feel like victims. They will feel restricted wherever they are, but people who love never feel restricted." We have this great temptation in our lives. I know it in the life as a priest. I know married couples experience it. I know it's just part of who we are. That the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right? And we feel like, well, my vocation, you know, if only I were married to somebody else. If only my job was something else. If only I had a different parish. If only my pastor was different. If only, you know, we go on and on. If only, if only, if only, because we feel restricted. We feel like we're trapped. We can't have all of those good things. People who haven't learned to love will always feel restricted, but people who love never feel restricted. Maybe you've had this experience. I'm very fortunate. Father Ian and I get along really well. And we're on the same page, I think he may disagree, but I think we are with respect to, well, many things, but tidiness in the house, right? Maybe you've had the experience, you know, you come into the kitchen, there's the dishes, right? Left on the counter. Now, I don't have that here, but I've had that in other places. And what happens? Okay, so I'm the guy. I like, like, I want the clean countertop. I see the dish. And all of a sudden, this, like, huge thing starts happening, right? Who does that person think he is? What am I? His servant? What am I, a slave? Like, if I keep putting these dishes in the dishwasher, every time there's dishes on the counter, I'm just enabling him, right? He's never going to learn. And what about the next associate pastor? Like, is he going to have to put up with dishes on the counter? He needs to learn a lesson. So I'm going to leave the dishes on the counter. I'm not putting away. I have a right that we turn it into this huge, like, big deal, right? We turn it into a rights issue and enabling and we kind of get all this other stuff. It's like really, like, seriously? Why don't I just put the thing in the dishwasher? You know, be a man about, right? Like, why does it have to be that big a deal? Listen to this story. I know I told it here in the parish and homilies before you see. You've probably heard it, but I think it bears repeating. It does hurt me anyway. And I'll, you'll hear it again, because I love it. It's from St. Torres of Visio. Carmelite nun. She's in her early twenties at this time. She died at about 24, late 1800s, and a cloister. So, behind the grill, right? And she died again at 24, a relatively young age. One timeline was working in the laundry. In the sister opposite, I mean, you know, so picture the scene. Presumably, there's probably a few sisters who maybe are on a tub, right? And they're washing what we're going to find out. In the sister opposite, while washing handkerchiefs repeatedly splashed me with dirty water. Anchorchiefs. What's in handkerchiefs? All right? They're not washing the corp rules from maths, right? They're washing handkerchiefs. While washing handkerchiefs repeatedly splashed me with dirty water, my first impulse was to draw back and wipe my face to show the offender I should be glad if she would behave more quietly. Now, she had a very reasonable expectation, right? Hey, sis. Cool the jets. You can wash them a little less vigorously. Here I'll show you how, right? And she probably wouldn't have sinned, wouldn't have been a big deal, and the other sister would have been fine, right? No big deal. But the next minute, now, here's the moment in this story. Here's where I would have had the melt down and got all angry. But the next minute, so you can, she's engaging her, her thought, her will, she's, I thought how, but the next minute, I thought how foolish it was to refuse the treasures. God offered me so generously. And I refrain from betraying my annoyance. So she's engaged her will, and she's not going to do that thing. On the contrary, he goes to the next step. I made such efforts to welcome the shower of dirty water, that at the end of half an hour, so it didn't happen immediately. At the end of half an hour, I had quite taken a fancy to this novel kind of aspersion, and I resolved to come as often as I could to the happy spot where such treasures were freely bestowed. Holiness makes our lives better. Imagine all of the things, now, don't look at your spouse, don't move, don't make eye contact. Imagine all the things your spouse does that could become happy spots where treasures are freely bestowed. Can you think, don't nod if don't. Right? What happens? What is life like now? Okay, all of these things that annoy us, and we've all got them right in our lives. We've got things that drive us crazy. All of those things now, not only don't drive us crazy, but we see them as opportunities. That's what St. Therese saw. She's getting splashed in the face. She could have said, "Aces, dial it down." She didn't. She saw here is an opportunity for me to grow up, for me to learn how to love, for me to sacrifice, for me to become more holy. She capitalized, exploited that opportunity for what it was. The messy catch up top, right? The toothpaste, the sock on the floor. All of these things become opportunities to grow in holiness. Marriage is a vocation. Not just in general. It's not just a big general thing. Your marriage is your vocation. Your spouse is your ticket to heaven. Your spouse is the one from the very dawn of time God planned you to be with, to be sanctified by, to help sanctify, to grow in holiness together in mutual love, respect, sacrifice, to become more holy, to enjoy life more, to make these kinds of sacrifices. How do we do it? How do we do that? If you find out, let me know. I do have a few ideas but more from reading than experience. I don't want to be too self-deprecating. I can say with some in, from my own experience. There are times when I have experienced this and I know that it's real. So what are some of the things? Well, the first thing is to realize when we encounter these little moments rather than just letting our feelings and all of this stuff get the better of us, take in that moment and realize, okay, time out, here's an opportunity. Can I use this opportunity as an opportunity? Can I just put the dish away in the dishwasher and see it as an opportunity to grow up in holiness to learn how to love? There's the first thing just to have that very vision because we often don't, right? We don't even get to that point. So to have the vision, the next step requires a great, all of this actually requires a great deal of humility. But it's to realize that if, in the context of marriage, say, if I can think of things my spouse does, that drives me crazy, and everyone here was kind of chuckling when I said, can you think of things your spouse does, right? Probably everyone does a little something to drive the other person crazy, right? So I realize if people drive me crazy, I probably drive them crazy too, right? Just to realize that helps me to be patient, helps me to be humble so I don't get a bent out of shape. So what, the guy leaves the dish on the counter? Well, I probably do something somewhere else that drives him crazy. Three times in the scripture we read, God resists the proud, but he gives his grace to the humble. So when we have that moment just to try to be humble and serve. The next step also requires a lot of humility. It's to realize that what listen to the language we use, I say that person makes me annoys me, right? So that the one doing the annoying is the other person. It's actually wrong. Nine out of ten times, the cause of the annoyance is inside of me. I'm the problem. There's something inside of me that's gone wrong. That person is not meeting my expectations, is not doing what I want the person to do. And to realize, okay, there's something in me, there's some pride here, there's something that needs that I need to let go of. There's something that needs to die. In the scriptures we hear that language, die, we need to die to self, to die to that pride, that self-centeredness, that ego-tism. Again, St. Tres of Lucia, right? Something in that moment had to die. You know, she could have easily said to Sister Splashalot, cool down, right? And because the sister wasn't doing, wasn't sinning against her, wasn't doing something bad, right? Just was washing the laundry too, enthusiastically. And she had to realize, okay, well, that sister's obligation is not to please me. I need to die to myself here. And we see the end of the story that, well, she wanted to come as often as she could to the happy spot, where such treasures were freely bestowed. The next one is to realize not only that these are opportunities to help me to grow up and learn how to love, they're also litmus tests. They also tell me, "Do I know how to love?" You know, if I go through my life getting bent out of shape out over every little thing that annoys me, I need to do some serious introspection. Do I actually know how to love or am I faking it, right? Because what did Jesus say? "Love your enemy." If you love only those who love you, if you love those are easy to love. That's not even Christian love, my friends. He says the pagans, the Gentiles, tax collectors can do that. Christians have a different kind of love, they still have our enemies, they love those who drive us crazy. You know, if we're to love our enemies, we'll stand serious and we're to love people that we are close to, you know, family members who just do little things that bother us. So they become litmus tests as well. That's about it. I want to end with that ritual homily. It's not prescribed in the wedding ritual, the marriage ritual anymore, but it used to be. I don't know if it was optional or not. It's about four minutes long, but keep in mind it's to be given out of wedding, right, where you've got the people are just about to give their consent. So it's the final exhortation. But as I read it, here in the context of your own line, your own marriage is your own love for one another. Dear friends in Christ, as you know, you are about to enter into a union which is most sacred and most serious, a union which was established by God himself. By it he gave to a man and woman a share in the greatest work of creation, the work of the continuation of the human race. And in this way, he sanctified human love and enabled man and woman to help each other and live as children of God by sharing a common life under his fatherly care. Because God himself is thus its author, marriage is of its very nature, a holy institution, requiring of those who enter into it a complete and unreserved giving of self. But Christ our Lord added to the holiness of marriage an even deeper meaning and a higher beauty. He referred to the love of marriage to describe his own love for his church, that is, for the people of God whom he redeemed by his own blood. And so he gave to Christians a new vision of what married life ought to be, a life of self-sacrificing love like his own. It is for this reason that his apostle St. Paul clearly states that marriage is now and for all time to be considered a great mystery intimately bound up with the supernatural union of Christ and the church, which union is also to be its pattern. This union then is most serious because it will bind you together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate that it will profoundly influence your whole future. That future with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows is hidden from your eyes. You know that these elements are mingled in every life and are to be expected in your own. And so not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death. Truly then, these words are most serious. It is a beautiful tribute to your undoubted faith in each other, that recognizing their full import, you are nevertheless so willing and ready to pronounce them. And because these words involve such solemn obligations, it is most fitting that you rest the security of your wedded life upon the great principle of self-sacrifice. And so you begin your married life by the voluntary and complete surrender of your individual lives and the interest of that deeper and wider life which you are to have in common. Henceforth, you belong entirely to each other. You will be one in mind, one in heart and one in affections. And whatever sacrifices you may hear after be required to make to preserve this common life, always make them generously. Sacrifice is usually difficult in irksome. Only love can make it easy and perfect love can make it a joy. We are willing to give in proportion as we love. Only when love is perfect, the sacrifice is complete. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, and the Son so loved us that He gave Himself for our salvation. Greater love than this no man hath, that a man may lay down His life for His friends. No greater blessing can come to your married life than pure conjugal love, loyal and true to the end. May then this love with which you join your hands and hearts today never fail, but grow deeper and stronger as the years go on. And if true love and unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to man and woman in this veil of tears. The rest is in the hands of God, nor will God be wanting to your needs. He will pledge you the lifelong support of His graces in the holy sacrament which you are now going to receive.