Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1515510
15 DENVER CATHOLIC | FEB-MAR 2024 must learn how to love the woman he married. To prolong that first Beatri- cian moment in which, as Dante tells it, "something like the glory of God was seen walking down the street towards him." The memory of she who first shone like the sun must now be carried, gladly, right to the very end. We are, each of us, to love one another, or die. "To bear the beams of love," is how the poet Blake put it. Now, then, unless St. Paul is lying, which the Church cannot very well countenance without betraying her- self and God, he means every word of it. Along with the entire tradition of the Christian West on whose teach- ing it depends. We are thus obliged, each of us every day, to try and imi- tate Christ in every way, not shirking for a second the job of carrying the cross for those we have promised to love. "Live in love," Paul urges us, "as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us." And as regards husbands and wives most particularly, Paul admonishes them: Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Without that necessary note, that catalyzing act of free and mutual sub- ordination to Christ, the temptation of the husband to lord it over his wife would surely become an obstacle well-nigh impossible to overcome. No marriage could survive so relentless an attack of the self-centered self. It would very quickly sink beneath the tyranny of the one and the bitterness and sorrow of the other. If that's where we start, the baseline on which we ground our understanding of marriage, we will surely need all the grace we can get. But then, why else does Christ break himself to become our bread, our food for the journey, if not to enrich and fortify us along the way? Let Christ's own formula for consecration, then, be the place where all good things begin: TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY, WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU. 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."