Showing posts with label premarital sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label premarital sex. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

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