Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

The Vocation of Marriage

The preparation leading up to most weddings almost inevitably takes up seemingly endless hours of planning - from selecting invitations, gowns and tuxedoes to planning the honeymoon and choosing and ordering the floral arrangements. For many couples the idea of attending a Pre-Cana is at best an obligatory exercise which takes them away from "more important" aspects of wedding preparation. There is a distinction, however, between wedding preparation and marriage preparation. The former is about one day - admittedly a very important day - the latter about the life of a couple from now through to eternity. Father George Appleyard explains in his book Light of the East that Byzantine Christians view marriage as "a living display of Christ's truly unending love for his Church. Christ's love is forever. A love that demonstrates [Christ's love] must be forever too." So for us Byzantine Christians the notion of the promise of love "till death do us part" is a foreign one.

Pope John Paul II, who has written extensively on the marital relationship and family life, wrote in Familiaris Consortio that through the sacrament of matrimony the couple have the grace and duty
· "to commemorate the great works of God and of bearing witness to them before their children"
· "of putting into practice in the present, towards each other and their children, the demands of a love which forgives and redeems;" and
· "of living and bearing witness to the hope of the future encounter with Christ."

The couple do this, wrote John Paul II, as they (1) form a community of persons "rooted in the personal and total self-giving of the couple," (2) serve life, (3) participate in the development of society, and (4) share in the life and mission of the Church.
The conjugal act serves to bring the couple into communion with one another forming the core of the community of persons - the family -- as well as to create new persons - children - for the community.
The call to marriage is a call above all to faithfulness, fidelity, generosity and hospitality. It is about sacrifice as much as it is about joy. It is about love in all its forms. To focus on the wedding or the honeymoon is to trivialize marriage.

St. John Chrysostom's reference to the family as the "domestic church" captures very succinctly what we have been discussing. It is very powerful and very profound. Interestingly, marriage, at a societal level is a very ordinary thing. - which has been even more trivialized by the mores of our time. What we must always remember is that just as the very ordinary gifts of bead and wine can become extraordinary through the sacrament of the Eucharist, so to can the marriage of a man and woman become extraordinary through the sacrament of matrimony.

The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that marriage is the vocation through which most people attain sainthood. Not coincidentally John Paul II called upon the Church to consciously seek to recognize persons who have achieved sanctity through their vocations of marriage. Far from denigrating marriage, the Church implores us to treasure this gift of marriage which has the power to sanctify, transform and create new life.

When we live our lives according to our Christian vocations - whether it is through marriage and family or as celibate religious and clergy - we come to experience the every feeling imaginable and live through unimaginable circumstances. When we maintain our fidelity and faithfulness to our vocations we are living witnesses to the fidelity and faithfulness of God to His people. Therein lies the meaning of the Christian vocation of marriage.