Last Sunday’s Gospel was centered on the concept of marriage. Moses in the olden times allowed divorce in the Mosaic Law because of man’s hardness of heart. They did not understand the meaning of sacrifice and self-giving in their marriage. So, they ended up in divorce and in their adulterous conduct.
Christ introduced a new concept of a Christian marriage. It was told that; “Whatever God has united in marriage, let no man separate.” In this strong statement about marriage, it is given that once a couple decides to marry each other, their marriage will be binding until their death. Storms and huge waves may rock their boat of love, but it must stay afloat, and they must remain faithful to each other. This is the ideal kind of marriage that each couple in love must learn to live through before engaging in their “road of no return.”
However, if we will try to observe our present society, there are millions of cases of broken homes and failed marriages all over the world. Oftentimes, it is the children who suffer and bear much of the weight of the negative consequences. Minor violators of the law have increased dramatically as failed marriages continue to rise in numbers. This relative increase can be easily understood psychologically because all children in this world need to live and grow in a normal family.
The Pope’s decision to somehow loosen the Church’s laws on marriage is not meant to go against Christ’s idea of marriage but simply to save the best for last. I mean, if everything in marriage had been said and done and still nothing remedies the negative situation, then, the best solution lies in having the couple separated. This decision is tough for all those who will be affected but that is the price they must pay for their unfaithfulness and mistakes.
I still value the kind of Christian marriage as it was made known to me by no less than my own parents. Their marital relationship is not the envy of anybody because theirs was a relationship founded on the Christian ideals of marriage. Problems, hardships, and poverty never left us and somehow, as a family, we were able to survive. We survived not because problems and poverty have left us but because the love that we have for one another as a family never left us in the darkness of these present global problems.
I do not know the real problem in the couples of today who will start up so lovely and end up badly and even deadly sometimes. They never understood the real meaning of love. They have mistakenly understood love as the sheer sexual relationship in their marriage. Or they have overly seen love as a perfect thing that any negative experience like poverty and other evil things must never be present and once these things begin to invade their life, they will simply fade away as a couple.
All negative elements that may have crept in in marriage are all challenges that each couple will have to face hand in hand. These evil things are not supposed to blow them away but, if viewed in the Christian way, they are supposed to tighten them closer to their love relationship.
Love is made to be perfect. There is no doubt about it because God himself is love. If love relationships end up so badly it is because lovers can be so imperfect at times. Jealousy, distrust, unfaithfulness, selfishness, and other things sometime rule the heart of the lovers and in an essential way affects the perfection of love. But human as we are, we cannot really expect to love another in a perfect way.
Well, we do not have to fret and lose heart that we can never love in a perfect way of loving. We are just humans after all who are prone to commit mistakes in every aspect of our lives. It is okay because God knows that fact very well. We do not have to look good to be loved forever by our beloved and we do not have to try our best in futility to be perfect because we can never be one. All we can do is constantly try our best to be less and less imperfect and we can effect a change in this trending news of marital separations and cases of divorce.
Joy in marriage is the perfect thing that we must look for and uphold in the married life. We may be happy as a couple and we may experience pleasure all the time. But they are never enough because joy is required when married life is at stake. Na maski tilipo na, gurang na, dai na gapahamut (bihira na sana), still they are in so much in love with one another as evidenced by their natural and honest smile to each other. Couples like this may have really found that joy in their marriage. How I wish each couple will strive to find that joy in marriage because this is the kind of marriage that Christ had in mind when he said that “what God has put together, let no man separate!”