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
