A Key Ingredient to a Long and Joyful Marriage
39
This month, my husband and I will be married for 39 years.
The night of our wedding, my husband promised me that our marriage would always be an adventure. At the time, I laughed at his cute comment. Today, I realize the beauty of his promise and what it took for us to keep our love alive for all these years.
Jeff and I came of age during the hippy generation. It was a time of great confusion about love, marriage and family life. Despite the shifts in the culture's understanding on these matters, both of us retained our Catholic faith and its underlying teachings. Why neither of us lost our way in the 1970s can be credited to the witness of our parents who revealed in their daily actions God’s plan for marriage and family life.
My husband has fond memories of participating in neighborhood Corpus Christi processions and his father leaving early for work to attend daily Mass. He remembers his family praying the rosary. I remember the how we knelt beside our beds each night in prayer to ask for protection and blessings on our family.
Neither of us can remember a Sunday without Mass or the consistent guidance from our mothers who reminded us to always love our siblings, to use our best manners with others, and to save our pennies to help those less fortunate. Our homes were schools of love and virtue and our parents were the primary educators.
We were blessed to be raised in a Catholic environment.
It certainly helped. But, the real reason that we never fell into the free love philosophy of our youth is that our parents practiced marital chastity. They followed God's plan for human sexuality. Their faithful and undying openness to God's mystery of human sexual love left a lasting imprint on both of us.
Sexuality is one’s capacity to love as either a male or a female. It is a fundamental part of each and everyone of us. In his Letter to Families, Pope Saint John Paul II writes about how sexuality enriches the whole person, body, soul, and emotions, and that sexuality allows us to become a gift of self to the other.
In the case of human persons, sexuality is what draws us to another person and to love them. But, the draw that results from sexuality is not just instinctual like it is in animals. (In the animal kingdom, animals have a sexual urge and act upon it). While some human persons may approach their ability to give and receive love in that way, the reality is that human persons by our very nature have the capacity to rise above the instinct.
In God’s plan, human persons have the aptitude to form bonds of communion (friendships for example) because of sexuality. In addition, within the intimate community of marriage, sexuality is ordered towards the conjugal union–which is designed to be much more than a body needing a body. It is a union of two persons who mutually sanctify each other and ask for the blessing of new life.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality is very different from that of the culture.
Our doctrine presents sexuality as a God-given gift that draws us out of our self to love another person who is both body and soul. It finds it expression first in the ability to form bonds of charity and most profoundly in the unity of a husband and wife. It is more than just a sexual urge that one must satisfy. It has the capacity to increase one’s love and to create new human persons.
Our parents were chaste. They chose to develop the firm habit to do what was right and good with their sexuality. They understood and accepted that chastity would be a life-long process.
Even though it must have been hard, they placed their sexual urges under the governance of their thinking and reasoning. That allowed them to know the good and choose the good. It gave them the freedom to give themselves as gifts to another and to receive what was given as gift. Chastity made it possible for them to love each other as gift and not use each other.
We've worked hard to achieve the same caliber of marriage as our parents. Just like them, the bedrock upon which our marriage has flourished is the practice of chastity. It has allowed us the ability to govern our passions and find peace rather than be dominated by emotions and whims. Chastity has given us the freedom to be helpmates for each other and walk side by side, evenly yoked in dignity, sacrifice and joy.
Chastity is a vital and great part of marriage.
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