Oh True Love

 

Oh True Love

June is just around the corner and many happy couples are about to stand before God and the community to recite their vows to love and cherish one another forever.  Their promises to love, come good or bad, will be such that only death itself will be able to part them.  What a truly joyful occasion it is!  Marriage, children – the family – is one of the most sacred institutions on earth, which is why the Catholic Church calls it the domestic church.  The sanctity of this union is often expressed by the couple’s decision to be married in a church, for the bride to wear a white gown and to include Biblical Scripture during the ceremony.

True love is a much more difficult concept than many people realize.  Feeling warm and fuzzy towards someone and imagining the perfect life you will have together is easy and often a distortion of reality.   True love always seeks to serve others before themselves.  This can be tough when we are in bad moods, having trouble at work, tired.  But true love perseveres regardless of how hard it can be.  Following God and pleasing him are all important in our quest for a long and happy marriage.  We simply cannot have a good married life without serving others and thereby serving God.

Most couples today have already offended God by living together and/or having pre-marital sex.  Christians know this is wrong but they rationalize that because they love each other it’s okay to engage in sexual activity as long as it is only with one another.  Besides, you’re getting married anyway, right?

The truth is that it is never okay to be sexually active outside of marriage.  There are reasons why it’s important to God that we wait until we are formally married before we engage in sexual activity.  Couples who are sexually active and are not married do not have to fret or stop reading this column because they don’t want to face what they’ve done.  The solution is to go to confession, then wait until you are married before engaging in further sexual activity.  God will forgive and forget as long as you are sincere.

Let’s face it, today even many Christians are more secular than they are Christian.  To be fair, it’s difficult not to fall into the traps of secularism.  It’s all around us and “everybody is doing it.”  It’s gotten so bad that chastity until marriage is not even looked at as important anymore.  But it is very important to God and it is important for our souls. True love always, always does what is best for the other person.   And it is never good for one’s spouse-to-be or for oneself to give into the very strong temptation to engage in sex before marriage.  While living in the here and now, we cannot afford to forget about our souls.  True love is taking care of the soul of our beloved first and foremost.  If we give into their request for sex before marriage, even though it is wrong in the eyes of God, we do not love them the way we think we do.  We love ourselves before them and we are putting both ourselves and our beloved before God who was so gracious to have made our beloved and bless us with him or her.  We may not want our spouse-to-be to get mad at us or make us feel uncomfortable for refusing to have sex before we take our vows.  It’s certainly much easier to give in.  But whenever we put others before God or ourselves before our beloved, we can be sure we are not demonstrating true love, regardless of how we feel.

Lust is a very dangerous sin.  According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, lust is described as “disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure.  Sexual pleasure is morally misordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes” (par 2351).  Our Dear Lady of Fatima told the visionaries that more souls are condemned to Hell for disobeying God’s command to purity than for any other sin.

Not long ago I heard a woman say she had been living with a man for several years and they had intended to get married.  She said they have two children with a third on the way and the man who was supposed to marry her now has changed his mind.  You see, this sort of thing can always happen – and it does happen more than you might realize – regardless of how positive you are that you will eventually get married to the person you are living with.  But even if you do get married after engaging in pre-marital sex you are not off the hook.  Taking your sacred vows before God is crucial because, believe it or not, sex is sacred.  It is holy, when carried out with the right attitude of giving (which consists of leaving open the possibility of children) and not abusive or abused.  Sex is not meant to be a recreational activity.

The best gift you can give to one another is to be as pure as possible.  Even if in the past you have failed at this you can redeem yourself and start anew.  By continuing to engage in something that is meant to be sacred you make yourself less and less pure.  It also gets more and more difficult to see the marital act the way God intends for us to see and experience it when we have disordered sex that is not giving and loving, but is done primarily for the sake of feeling good.

Like everything else, this will be more difficult for some people than for others.  Some people may not be engaged to a spouse-to-be who follows his or her Christian faith or he or she may not be Christian at all.  This is something to think about because if you are to live a good Christian life your spouse should be on board with your doing what is right in the eyes of God.  If abstinence until you are married is particularly difficult, you must pray for the grace to be pure every day, several times a day.  Stay clear from anything that may tempt you, that might give you lustful thoughts or feelings.  Finally, stay humble.  Remember that you cannot rely on yourself if you are to remain pure.  You need God’s grace.  So remind yourself that you are nothing without God and that you can do nothing without Him.  Then pray that God might help you to be pure.

Once you are married you must continue to guard your soul against lust.  While sex within marriage is a great gift the misuse of it leads to the destruction of the soul.

Blessings to all of you who are married or about to be married!  May you and your family be surrounded by God’s grace.

Let neither gluttony nor lust overcome me,

And do not surrender me to a shameless soul.

 

Sirach 23:6

 

 

 

God in Human Suffering

 

 

God in Human Suffering

 The God who loves us more than anyone can comprehend, more than our parents or spouses love us, more than we love our children allows us to suffer.  What sense does this make?  Do we not shield our loved ones from suffering when we can?  If God is so merciful how can he allow horrific tragedies, illnesses and life-changing injuries?

If you feel forgotten by or even punished by God you are certainly not alone.  Many people who figure they do not deserve the heart-wrenching circumstances they are in feel abandoned by God.  How, after all, can God love us yet still allow the suffering we see day in and day out?  Why does God not punish those who do horrible things rather than those who are simply trying to serve him by raising their families and teaching their children about God and his great wonders?

God is not some far off spirit who looks down upon us waiting to zap us for failing to pray enough, for getting angry, eating too much, (insert your vices).  God wants to be – and is – part of the human condition.  Think about that.  God who is perfect and is worshipped by the angels and saints chooses to be part of all the faults, disappointments and imperfections that is the human condition.  So why doesn’t God jump in and heal us when we are suffering?

God allows us to suffer because we are called to be saints and saints suffer.  Jesus suffered and as Christians and disciples we are called to follow Jesus.  To heaven, yes.  But let us not forget the road Jesus traveled.  We are called to follow him on the road laid out for us.  This is naturally going to involve suffering because even Jesus suffered and he suffered much more than any one of us ever will on this earth.

This can be a very difficult concept to grasp and especially to accept.  When you are ill, it is not a natural reaction to think “Wow, this is great!  I’m preparing for sainthood.”  Most of us are more of the mindset, “I hate being sick” then proceed to be annoyed because we caught the latest bug going around.  It can be even worse when we have something more serious.  “Why did this happen to me?  I didn’t do anything that bad to deserve this.”

I was once watching Mother Angelica’s show on EWTN when a caller asked the nun why a particular relative suffered so much.  The caller’s relative was a very devout Catholic and the caller did not understand why God would allow this suffering by someone so loyal to God.  Mother Angelica told the caller that maybe because this woman is so devout that she suffers.  Jesus suffered and all saints are called to suffer.  Let’s not forget too that God allows us to do some of our purgatory on earth.  No matter how hard our circumstances are here, our being disallowed from being with God (Purgatory) until we are ready will be much harder.  We will have seen God and we will want more than we every wanted anything to be with him.  Yet we will not be allowed to do so until we are cleansed to the point when we may enter heaven.

If you feel you’ve been abandoned by God, take heart.  You have been called to sainthood!  How we handle our woes can please or displease God.  If we carry on complaining and feeling sorry for ourselves, this is obviously not the kind of behavior God is looking for from us.  Rather, we need to learn to offer up our suffering to God because of our love for him. 

“Lord, I offer up my suffering to you because of my love for you.  Please stay close to me and help me.  Above all, your will be done.”

This simple prayer is pleasing to God because in it we accept our suffering. In addition, we ask for God’s help and closeness but we ask that God’s will – not ours – be done.

Remember, God knows you.  He knows the areas in which you need to be healed and sometimes suffering is the way he heals us. He also realizes that disappointment and sadness are normal in harsh circumstances, so do not feel guilty for failing to rejoice when say, you are up all night with the latest version of the flu or going through a bout of depression.  Feeling gratitude for our suffering is a process and it takes time to get to where God is leading us so do the best you honestly can.  And be patient with yourself just as God is patient with you. 

Do not concern yourself with those who seem to “get away with everything” while they leave others to suffer in their wake.  Such people have problems of their own even if those problems are not obvious to us.  Not knowing God, not loving God and failing to serve God is suffering in itself.  And while many Christians believe that all who simply believe that Jesus is the Son of God are going to heaven regardless of what they do or how they act on earth, Catholics believe no such thing.  Catholics believe that we have decisions to make.  Anyone can, after all, say they believe that Jesus is the Son of God but many do not realize the full weight of their assertion.  We cannot simply accept Jesus as Lord to “be on the safe side” and expect to enter heaven.  Those who cause, do or permit evil in the world have more problems than the worst suffering cancer patient.  The cancer patient may well be preparing for heaven, but the evil-doer is preparing for a different place entirely.  He must turn from his evil ways because there is no place in heaven for evil.  Unfortunately, we are all sinners and none of us are perfect or guaranteed a place in heaven.  But the cancer patient is beginning his healing process while the healthy, oppressive evil-doer has a long way to go if he ever gets there.

God will not abandon you.  He wants to be close to you and the closer you draw to him the closer he will draw to you.   In suffering, consider yourself blessed.  You are in training for sainthood and to enter the Kingdom of God.