Denver Catholic

14 FEB-MAR 2024 | DENVER CATHOLIC I t isn't every day that a father gets to give away his own daughter. And tell me, why would he want to do that? Why surrender a beloved child to someone who could not possibly have known or loved her as he has? Because he has hope. He is hoping that a certain man will not betray the promise made before God to love and cherish her forever. That's why. "Pretty thin ice," says the skep- tic. "See that it doesn't crack wide open, plunging you and all your high-sounding words into the icy waters below." And yet it has hap- pened to me again and again. As recently as the week before Christ- mas, in fact. And with two more waiting in the wings, that makes five before I die. It is never easy, let me tell you. Nor am I alone in saying so. Others have told me the same thing — that it's the most wrenching reminder a father can have of a relationship that will never be the same again. Which is why St. Paul writes as he does to the Church in Ephesus, in words so riveting that they have long since found their way into every covenant of Christian marriage: For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. What a mystery this is! Only the transformative wonders of divine grace can account for it. There is no other explanation. Because here is God himself reaching into the hearts of two disparate beings in order to create a union so sublime as to exceed every expectation, every promise of nature and experience. Mere human love lifted onto the plane of divine glory — baptized unto beatitude — who can imagine such a thing? And to think that we really had very little to do with it! An act of transmutative surgery so profound that, all at once, two bodies become one, never to be separated until death. But not, we must never forget, at the expense of nature herself. A consummation, yes, but there is no cancellation cost. Grace may perfect, but it does not abolish nature. The child I give away to another does not thereby cease being my daughter, any more than I cease being her father. The order of ontology given to us by God, placed in being by God, will be respected. When from the loins of honest human love new life springs forth into being, that is a good thing. How does the Church herself put it in the Collect for the Mass on Christ- mas Day? O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. It is in that singular exchange transacted by Christ while hanging lifeless upon the cross that we locate the whole meaning of Christian mar- riage. And every other sacrament. What happens, therefore, on the day of my daughter's marriage is that, in becoming the wife of another, she now belongs to him, the sacrament which they themselves administer having joined them so indissolubly that nothing on earth has the power to undo the knot. Not even the couple themselves can dissolve a union thus ratified by God. This is why, as the Apostle to the Gentiles makes clear, it is now up to him, her husband, to love her, even as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the Church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. A tall order, to be sure. Impossi- bly demanding, some would say. I mean, does anyone actually expect husbands to live up to so loft y an ideal? To subject all that they have and are to what Chesterton, in his stirring "Defense of Rash Vows," has called, "this transfiguring self-dis- cipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing"? Who is equal to an act of such complete self-empt ying, of a consecration to another so totalizing as to define his entire life and rela- tionship to her and to the children whom God may bring forth? And yet how can the obligation laid upon husbands be less exacting than the one Christ himself took on in going up to Calvary to suffer and die? As the poet Robert Haydon writes in words applicable to every husband and father: What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices …? Marriage will be the school in which husbands find out, where each A Father's Musings on the Marriage of His Daughter BY REGIS MARTIN National Catholic Register P E R S P EC TIVE

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