“Listen then, dear husbands and wives, to your own heart. You will hear it sing the generous and selfless hymn, which yearns for the total gift of self. This imperious desire for mutual sacrifice, will be satisfied in you only if the gift to each other, sanctioned by sacred vows, is to be complete, unreserved, irrevocable, like the gift of yourselves which you must make to God.” (29, from “Dear Newlyweds” Pope Pius XII)

Sacramental love is the best of love because it has its beginning and end in God. Do you believe this? This is what Pope Pius is sharing with us today. There is a love that comes before love. It is a creative and generously awesome love that is what brings all things into being. We are reminded in faith and hope, we prepare ourselves for the love of another by loving God, who loves us first. It is how we prepare before that allows to love after and forever.
When do we begin to prepare for marriage? (the priesthood? the consecrated life?) In some ways as we are formed within the womb of our mother and as we take our first breath and form our first words and choose our first choice. The example of faith, hope and charity; the love God desires for us in the lives of those around us in the counter cultural sign of the sacred sacramental bond of love in Holy Matrimony. At least this is God’s plan. As we hear in Matthew 19:4-6, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?”
As we know Jesus is answering the question about sin and divorce and how this interrupts God’s plan. Interrupts but not stop, because in faith and hope we continue to strive for love in living the example of God’s charity extending beyond the pain of brokenness and into a new a glorious future.

“Charity is one; the bond interwoven between you in Christian marriage has something of the divine in its nature, like religion itself, and thus something of the eternal in its effects. Be faithful to it.” (30, from “Dear Newlyweds” Pope Pius XII)

Check out a Worldwide Marriage Encounter Weekend near you to hear more about God’s plan for your marriage. http://www.wwme.org

God Bless

Fr. Mark