This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

In the last post in this series, I described four kinds of marriage: natural marriage, civil marriage, sacramental marriage, and “neo-marriage,” and said that I’d have more to say about sacramental marriage in another post. This is that post.

The first thing to point out is that these four kinds of marriage aren’t mutually exclusive. Both civil and sacramental marriage build on natural marriage, to begin with. A civil marriage need not be a sacramental marriage, and a sacramental marriage need not be a civil marriage (though in this country, at least, they mostly are). Being “sacramental” is an additional layer added to natural marriage by Jesus Christ. And that means we need to talk about what a sacrament is.

Here’s the deal. As Christians, God asks a lot of us. Becoming holy is no easy thing, and we can’t do it on our own. So He gives us help, in the form of grace. And because we are not simply spiritual beings, but are naturally body-and-soul together, Jesus gave us the sacraments: physical actions by which He promises to give us spiritual graces, provided that the relevant conditions are made. Thus, baptism, a pouring of water combined with particular words, cleanses us of Original Sin and makes us co-heirs with Christ.

(Note: I am not a theologian; I am a software engineer. If I screw this up, somebody please gently let me know, so I can fix it.)

There are three things that are required for a valid sacrament:

• The valid form
• The valid matter
• The proper intent

The form is the ritual involved. In baptizing someone, you must baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The matter is the water, and, I imagine, the person being baptized. And the proper intent is the intent to baptize the person. In the Eucharist, the form is the Mass, the matter is the gifts of bread and wine, and the intent is the intent that the Holy Spirit should come upon the gifts and make them the Body and Blood of Christ.

If any of these three requirements are not met, there’s no sacrament. For example, a priest can say the Eucharistic prayers all day long, but if he’s simply intending to memorize them rather than “confect the sacrament”, then there is no sacrament.

So let’s look at marriage. The form is the wedding vows the couple make to each other before witnesses. The intent is the intent to be truly married in Christian matrimony, forsaking all others, until death do them part. The matter, well, the matter is the couple themselves; and there’s a reason we use the phrase “consummating the marriage.”

Catholics, of course, are required to get married in the Church. This involves pre-marital counseling (to make sure the couple have the right intent) and a Catholic wedding service (to make sure the form is correct). The consummation can usually safely be left to the couple themselves. Now, the requirement to be married in the Church is, as I understand it, a matter of canon law rather than Church doctrine; and indeed, the Church assumes that Christians married in other denominations are also sacramentally married….assuming the intent is right.

This, by the way, is what it means for a marriage to be annulled: a Church tribunal looks into it and determines that the conditions for a valid sacramental marriage were not met, e.g., because one of the two were previously married, or because one or both did not truly intend Christian matrimony.

Being a sacrament, marriage confers grace on the couple: grace that will strengthen them and (if used properly) allow them to grow in holiness together. And as I’ve indicated above, the proper action of the sacrament isn’t simply the vow the two make to each other; it’s also the consummation, the act of sex itself, by which the two of them become one flesh.

Now, if you think about, how cool is that? Here’s a sacrament the couple can enjoy over and over again, without help from anyone else, in the privacy of their own home, and be truly blessed by God each time. It’s not only good, it’s good for them!

There’s more to sacramental marriage than that, of course. There’s a whole vast theology, some of which I’m slightly familiar with, and which I really don’t feel qualified to to describe at more than the simplest possible level. For example, marriage is an image of the faithful, self-sacrificing and fruitful love of God for his people; and it is this that is behind the Church’s prohibitions on divorce, contraception, and sex outside of marriage.

I don’t propose to defend the Church’s teachings here; I’m more concerned with their consequences. And the chief point I want to make is that sacramental marriage is pretty darn cool, being the intersection of the love of a man and woman for each other with the love of God for them both, yielding significant spiritual benefits for the couple.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

Before I get started, I’d like to remind those who came in late that I’m not pushing a political agenda here. I’m trying to work out some thoughts about marriage in general, and on same-sex marriage in particular, in the light of the Church’s teaching. I’m not trying to prove that the Church’s teaching is true, and I’m more concerned with figuring out how to treat others well than I am in trying to coerce others into behaving the way I think they should. Thus, comments on how evil my political agenda is will be deleted. ‘Nuff said.

Several of the commenters on this post raised the issue of marriage as a civil institution vs. marriage as a religious institution, and suggested that while one might have religious reasons for the position that marriage is necessarily heterosexual, there’s no reason why civil marriage need be similarly bound. It was also suggested that the state “provides marriage” to its citizens: that marriage is essentially a civil institution, e.g., an institution governed by the state.

That last proposition, however, is clearly nonsense. People have been marrying and giving in marriage for all of recorded history, whether the people involved lived in something we would recognize as a state or not. Let’s call this natural marriage. It is not essentially religious, and it is not essentially civil. It is, quite simply, human. Getting married and raising a family is what human beings do. Natural marriage does not depend on the state; on the contrary, the state is built upon the foundation of natural marriage.

With the state came civil marriage. Marriage creates families, and families accumulate property and squabble with other families, and the state naturally gets involved in these things. Thus, civil marriage is marriage as recognized by the state. Note that I do not say “regulated” or “controlled”. Marriage is prior to the state, and many traditional restrictions on marriage, such as incest laws, are of ancient origin. It might be truer to say that civil marriage is the way the state handles the pre-existing institution of marriage.

With Christianity came sacramental marriage. Civil marriage was already well established by the time Christianity came along, but sacramental marriage does not build on it; rather, civil and sacramental marriage are like two shoots from the same root of natural marriage. I’ll have more to say about sacramental marriage in a later post; here I’ll simply note that the notion that marriage is between a man and a woman long pre-dates any form of Christian marriage. Even the Greeks, among whom sex with boys and sexual relationships between older men with younger men were not uncommon, kept them quite apart from marriage.

And that brings us to what I’ll call neo-marriage, for lack of a better term. Neo-marriage is solely about the two people involved, and only for as long as they want to remain involved. It is disconnected from sacramental marriage, at least as practised by the Catholic Church, because it is not sacramental, and is not expected to be permanent; it is detached from natural marriage because it is more about the couple than about the resulting family. Its foundation, to the extent that it has one apart from the couple themselves, lies in civil marriage, but its roots are not deep.

Same-sex marriage, as such, is an extension of neo-marriage to gay and lesbian couples. Since it can’t be based on natural marriage, it has to get its legitimacy from civil marriage. Which explains the comments I’ve been getting.

The following chart shows why discussing marriage with others who do not share your presuppositions is fraught with peril.

I suspect that most people’s notions of marriage form a subset of the items on the chart. Trouble is, for two different people the overlap can exclude what one or the other finds to be most important.

I won’t belabor the point.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

A couple of posts ago I described a couple “living in sin,” and raised this question: what is my responsibility to this couple vis à vis the foundational sin in their lives?

That’s an extremely complex question, and one that I do not expect to answer in any detail here. I rather expect that if I go back to one of the old manuals of moral theology—which, mind you, I have never read (yes, I’m making this up as I go along)—I’ll find a whole passel of material on it. These are just some thoughts that have occurred to me.

First, it seems to me that the fact that this is a couple “living in sin” is to some extent irrelevant. We are all, in some measure or other, “living in sin”. So the more general question is, what is my responsibility to the people of this world vis à vis the sin in their life?

And that clearly depends on the relationship I have with them. I have the responsibility to guide and guard my underage children, and to help form their consciences. Marriage is about holiness, as I’ve said, so I have a responsibility to Jane, as she does to me, to work in that direction. Sometimes that will involve speaking about sin in our lives.

With people farther away than that, it gets difficult. What we’re doing if we speak to someone about sin we see in his life, as Leah noted in her post, is a kind of intervention, even it’s a mild and small one. If I have no relationship with the individual, rooted in love, such an intervention is likely to be unwelcome. (Aren’t all interventions unwelcome? It’s only the evident love and concern of those performing one—and the impossibility of escaping from them—that make it effective.)

And this is what we should expect. Jesus was clear: how dare I try to remove the mote from your eye when I’ve still got a log in mine?

So let’s go back to that couple, “living in sin.” Let’s say that I’m acquainted with them tangentially—I see them at work, or in some other social context. What is my responsibility to them, to point out the error of their ways?

In terms of a proactive responsibility, given that I am neither pastor nor parent nor in any other position of moral authority over them, I’m not at all sure I have one. It is not my role to go up to them, uninvited, and tell them that they are screwing up. They certainly already know that some people frown on what they are doing; all I’ll do by speaking to them about it is to make them add me to that category with a little “busy-body” flag attached. And anyway, St. Paul is clear that we aren’t to be busy-bodies.

So have I no responsibility to them at all? I think I do, but it’s a more a responsibility to people in general than to that particular couple. In fact, I think I have two responsibilities.

First, I must pray for them. Not necessarily about their sin, because, frankly, at the kind of distance I’m talking about the precise nature of their sin is going to be obscure to me (and for this, may we all be grateful). But I should pray for anyone the Lord brings to my attention, that he would bless them and make straight their paths to him. The process of making straight those paths will probably frustrate a lot of things in a sinner’s life that shouldn’t be there, but that’s between God and the sinner and not my concern. (Unless I’m the sinner.)

Second, I must not lie to them. This has two parts. First, if a fellow asks me, straight out, what I think, I need to tell him. I don’t mean giving him both barrels and knocking him flat on his can. I mean speaking the truth in love, calmly and peacefully.

“Do you think what we’re doing is wrong?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do, since you ask.”

The conversation could go any number of ways from there. If he wants to talk about it, we can talk about it. If not, not. And as always, listening is more important than speaking.*

That’s private speech. There’s also public speech, like this blog post. And here, too, if I should speak about matters of the day—as I am—I have a responsibility not to lie, not to mislead, not to lull people into a false sense of security. More on that later.

__________
* Would that I were better at listening than I am.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

I’m going to define another term, here: foundational sin. This is a sin that’s built into the foundations of one’s life. Consider a burglar, a person who “earns” his daily bread by stealing from others, and has done so for years. Theft, then, is a foundational sin in this person’s life. It has become part of who he is, part of his self-image.

Theft is objectively sinful; our hypothetical burglar needs to repent of it and change his ways. But that means changing everything about his life. He’ll need to find a new way of making a living. He’ll probably need to make new friends. The consequences of this kind of radical repentance in his life are incalculable.

Now suppose that our burglar becomes convicted of the inherent wrongness of his daily activities. He wishes to repent; but he just can’t see how to do it—can’t see how to make the necessary changes. He might feel trapped.

This is the sort of thing that leads people to despair, and it makes foundational sin very tricky to deal with.

I chose theft for this example, because theft is a sin that virtually everyone agrees is wrong, even thieves. No matter how well a burglar might justify his own thievery to himself, he’ll take a dim view of those who steal from him.

Now, consider sins that our culture is inclined to excuse, or that aren’t generally regarded as sins. The Church teaches, for example, that re-marriage after divorce is wrong, and that such a couple are committing adultery. Yet we see this all the time in our society. Suppose such a couple are drawn to the Church: and yet they have this foundational sin at the heart of their lives together. They made a commitment to each other in good faith, and they have built a life together, and they are told that the central truth of their lives must be repented of. This is extraordinarily difficult.

And this is precisely the situation that the committed same-sex couples of whom Leah writes are faced with.

Ouch.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

There’s something I was trying to get at in my last post in this series, and simply didn’t. And that is that many parts of our lives are a mish-mosh of the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral, of virtue and vice—and might rate highly on the good scale when looked at one way while being a pit of sin when looked at another way.

Consider a couple living in a committed relationship without benefit of marriage. (I’m unconcerned at this point with whether the relationship is same-sex or not; I’m also unconcerned at this point with whether the couple are Christians or not.) The point is that sex is going on outside of marriage, which is fornication according to the Church, and is a sin. From the sexual morality point of view, this is a bad thing. Fornication is a sin, and sin is bad both for society and for the people involved. (I don’t intend to argue that point here; that would be a separate series of posts.)

But on the other hand…suppose that these two people have been learning to love each other unselfishly, to sacrifice for each other. The sexual aspect of the relationship is sinful…and the yet the relationship is a vehicle for moral and spiritual growth. It might, in fact, represent a high-water-mark in their loves, morally speaking. There is sin in it, and yet it is the best thing that has ever happened to them, both subjectively and objectively speaking. I don’t think that it is unreasonable or wrong to say that God is using the relationship to bring the two people closer to Himself.

I don’t think that this scenario is at all unlikely; in fact, I think it likely that it’s going on all over the place.

Am I trying to “bless” their sin in some way? No, not at all. Sin is sin, and it remains sin. But I’ve noticed that in my life, God seems to deal with one kind of sin at a time. He doesn’t try to clean up the mess all at once; he deals with one room at a time. I suspect this is often the case.

When I look at other people, I often see messes in need of being cleaned up. But there are some things to remember about that:

• The mess that I see might not be the mess that’s most critical.
• The mess that I see might not be quite what I think it is.
• The mess that I see is quite likely none of my business.
• I’ve got messes of my own to clean up.

So I might look at this hypothetical couple and say to myself, “They’re living together; they really ought to either get married or split up.” But from God’s point of view, they might be on the path to redemption. I don’t know. I can’t know. And as C.S. Lewis points out, Aslan tells no one any story but his own.

Which brings me back to the point I was making in my last post. We need to love what is good, and we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So what is my responsibility to this hypothetical couple? Difficult question. It certainly depends on what my relationship to them is. But I think that will have to be another post.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

I want to pause a moment, and go back to Leah Libresco’s blog post that kicked off this set of reflections. She says,

There are a lot of out, queer people in relationships, raising children, or hoping very much to wind up in one or both of those categories. Pro-traditional marriage movements are a threat to their relationships with the people they love most.

Leah suggests that when we oppose same-sex marriage, we are in effect asking these people to leave their partners; that we are saying that they should break up with people who love them, for their own good. Or, perhaps, she is saying that that’s what people in committed same-sex relationships hear us saying. In essence, we appear to be saying, “This relationship in which you have found love and joy—it’s bad. There’s nothing good about it. The love and joy you’ve found: it’s an illusion. We reject it, and you should, too.”

It struck me when I read Leah’s post, and I continue to think, that this extreme point of view is indefensible. It might be what “queer people in relationships” hear; and it might be what some of us do in fact think. And it might be true in certain cases; some relationships are simply toxic for one or both partners.

But consider two people who have made a commitment to each other, who have agreed to support each other through thick and thin, who have taken on the commitment of raising children as best they know how, who are practicing patience, loyalty, forgiveness, charity towards each other: is there nothing there that is good?

Is there sin in such a relationship? Surely, because there is sin in every human being we meet, and hence in every relationship. But there can be great goodness as well. We need to recognize that, and we need to love what is good.

Are there moral issues involved with same-sex marriage? Certainly there are (for the record, my views on sexual morality can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church). It must be difficult for a same-sex couple approaching the Church to put aside those aspects of their relationship. But that is not to say that everything must be put aside. It may be necessary to make changes, but against charity there is no law.

This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

What are families (natural or intentional) for? There are many ways to answer that question; one way is in terms of its effect on individual people. People, of course, are intended for God; our task in this life is to allow God to so mold us that we will be ready to enjoy spending eternity with him. To put it another way, we are here to become holy; and we should look at everything in our lives in that light.

So let’s look at families in terms of how well they encourage holiness. This is not the only way to look at them, certainly, but let’s give it a try.

I am not an expert in the Church’s theology of marriage; I’m just this guy, ya know? But I do know that part of the point of marriage-until-death-do-us-part is that it gives us lots of opportunities to forgive, forbear, help out, and in general to live in service to others: to serve Christ in the other members of the family. This applies especially to the parents once children show up, but it is true even of childless couples. It’s a true grace, it seems to me, that God gives to couples and families.

Is this grace restricted to what I’ve called natural families? By no means. As Tim Muldoon pointed out in a comment on my previous post, the Holy Family can be regarded as an intentional family in my terms, at least from St. Joseph’s point of view.

A Benedictine monastery can also be seen as an intentional family in my sense. The monks make a vow of stability: they promise to live in the monastery, with the other monks, for the rest of their lives. And just as in marriage, part of the point is that living with others, warts and all, can be a powerful school of holiness.

As I indicated in my last post, I think life in intentional families is more difficult than in natural families, in that there really are natural bonds of affection between parents and their natural children that don’t exist in, say, a monastery. And because of that, I think you could make a case that an intentional family can be an even more powerful school of holiness than a natural family: to make it work, you have to put more into it, and so you get more out of it.

That’s just a conjecture on my part, mind you, but it seems likely to me.

As before, I’m speaking of the family, natural or intentional, at its best. It can be a powerful school of holiness; I think it is intended to be; but it’s certainly possible to play hooky from school, especially if you’ve no notion that that’s one of things it is for.

In short, both kinds of family can be a great aid to holiness; and both can completely fail to hit the mark; but it’s probably easier—indeed, more natural—for natural families.