Marriage is Love

“Marriage is the human experience that begins to make God comprehensible to humans.”(1)

I came across that statement while I was reading in the adoration chapel.  ‘Reading’ is a very generous description…flipping through pages is probably more accurate.  Whenever I visit the chapel for adoration, I always have a hope in the back of my mind that God will begin speaking to me, and his voice and message will be loud and clear.  Since I have never audibly heard his voice, however, over the years, my backup plan usually involves grabbing a bible and 1 or 2 or 5 other books.

One evening I found myself thumbing through a book entitled “Witness to Hope”, written several years ago about Pope Saint John Paul II.  For whatever reason, I stopped about midway into the book and began reading.  As I skimmed down the page, I read “Marriage is the human experience that begins to make God comprehensible to humans.”  Wow!  I read it again.  I still hope to hear God speak to me audibly someday, but until then, I felt like the message was pretty clear. 

God.  The Trinity.  A great mystery of our faith, and one we can only hope to understand once we gain our eternal reward in heaven.  What if something on earth had the prospect of even beginning to make that mystery comprehensible?  That would be a truly wondrous thing!  Marriage IS that wondrous thing.  What is God?  In the most concise way our human words can state, God is love.  What is marriage?  When you strip away everything else and bring it down to its true core, Marriage is love.

How do we know what love is?  Too many people still view love as the feeling of butterflies in your stomach at someone’s touch.  They hope for the euphoric happiness felt once upon a time during a marriage proposal.  They long for the amazing visual display of a wedding ceremony. 

What love truly is, was described most perfectly by Saint Paul.  I’m talking about 1 Corinthians 13:4-13.  We all know this verse, even if we don’t recognize it immediately.  It’s worth pulling out your bible and giving this passage another read.  Read it with your spouse.  If we have ever known the type of true love described in 1 Corinthians, then we have been given the gift of a small comprehension of God.  In marriage, we have an opportunity to attain that gift.

May God bless your marriage.

Written by:  Matt Buehrig      Inspired by:  Wendy Buehrig

(1)  The first quote was from “Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II” by George Weigel. 

I’m admittedly not very good at referencing sources.  This statement was footnoted, and the referenced source was also footnoted, and it eventually led back to one of John Paul II’s own writings, produced in Polish under a pseudonym, when he was a young priest.  Regretfully, I can’t say whether or not the exact statement can be attributed to the saintly pope, or whether it was paraphrased by one of the other authors along the way, but nevertheless, the impact is the same.