English
EspañolWhat is the mystique proper to spouses? That of uniting themselves to God by living their conjugal union. By founding it, preserving it, making it grow, and restoring it to health. How? With mutual faithful, free, gratuitous, fruitful, and definitive love. This is how God loves us.
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“Marriage is also the experience of belonging completely to another person. Spouses accept the challenge and aspiration of supporting one another, growing old together, and in this way reflecting God’s own faithfulness. This firm decision, which shapes a style of life, is an “interior requirement of the covenant of conjugal love,” since “a person who cannot choose to love for ever can hardly love for even a single day.” At the same time, such fidelity would be spiritually meaningless were it simply a matter of following a law with obedient resignation. Rather, it is a matter of the heart, into which God alone sees (cf. Mt 5:28). Every morning, on rising, we reaffirm before God our decision to be faithful, come what may in the course of the day. And all of us, before going to sleep, hope to wake up and continue this adventure, trusting in the Lord’s help. In this way, each spouse is for the other a sign and instrument of the closeness of the Lord, who never abandons us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20).” (The Joy of Love, n.319)
Commentary
In some cases, a type of failure that I have seen brought to my attention during counseling has been the fracture and total independence between the conjugal and spiritual life. Moreover, these were Christian spouses; at least they were baptized. However, they suffered from such a mentality – perhaps due to a defect in their religious education or their doctrinal formation – according to which “mysticism,” that is, the access of their hearts to intimate union with God, is something reserved for a select and scarce elite of saints, somewhat poets and madmen, such as Teresa of Jesus or John of the Cross. From this point of view, they assumed that the wedding and married life are “earthly” things, prosaic and mundane, full of burdens and “pedestrian” responsibilities, and, in themselves, utterly alien to a spirituality comparable to mysticism. They thought that whoever wants to be a mystic should go to a convent retire from the world, but do not expect it from married life.
This monumental error caused such enormous damage! It has left many spouses, especially in the difficulties, trials, and storms that life brings to all, without the tender light, consolation, grace, and companionship of God Himself.
How could they believe that, right there in those trials, misfortunes, obscurities, and risks of shipwreck – as also in the joyful and pleasurable moments – the Triune God was waiting for them, impatient to accompany them, immensely merciful with our defects and limitations, but no less generous to obtain for them precisely in all that – the prosaic, pedestrian, ordinary and commonplace – the best harvest of love between the spouses themselves and the most extraordinary loving intimacy with God Himself?
For the spouses to be their union of love and be united with God is the same thing.
The spirituality proper to spouses, their conjugal mystique, is that of living amongst each other their faithful, free, gratuitous, definitive, and fruitful love. For this love preserves their intimate union, makes it grow, and heals it from fatigue, erosion, and wounds. It is a free love because it does not arise from threats, mistreatment, coercion, and violence, but from the self-giving and embracing of those who are masters of themselves and thus recognize, coexist, and respect each other. It is gratuitous because it is neither bought nor sold; it has no price and cannot be exchanged for material interests. It rather arises from that love that “can only be paid for with love,” which is manifested in the unconditional selflessness of surrender, embrace, and union between spouses. It is definitive because both spouses give themselves entirely, in all that they are throughout their lives, in sickness, and health, in fortune and misfortune, in youth and old age, overcoming all changes and circumstance by means of the great test of true love, which is mutual fidelity against the erosion of time and the fickle inconsistency of selfishness. It is a fruitful union because this love is open to the children and the family home’s construction.
When two spouses strive together to love each other faithfully, freely, gratuitously, and definitively, they manifest the face of the Trinity in creation: the image and likeness of God Love placed in the conjugal union between a man and a woman. At the same time, they embody within their union the unconditional and merciful fidelity of the love with which God himself loves. When, because they are baptized, their union is sacramental, then Christian spouses are also an efficacious sign of the union of Jesus with his Church, a union in the flesh and the spirit. For this reason, living the intimate communion of life and love is, for both spouses, their way of access to intimate union with God, their specific spirituality, their particular mystical experience. It is not to be sought outside. It is within their conjugal union and is realized by preserving it, making it grow, and healing its wounds.
