The dismay at the reminders of married life can be strong.
Our lives are so full of upsets, disappointments, wounds, etc. that we wonder how life could be lived without compromise or totally apart, without inevitable injustices or in a reconstituted village… like a mohican-catho reserve!
Isn’t this the situation the disciples find themselves in when their Master tells them that marriage is unique and forever, as faithful and indissoluble as the Lord’s love for us?
Who could be the ideal wife for their spouse?
What husband could finally find the one who has been waiting for so long?
And in the course of time and life’s wounds, who could claim to be able to preserve the treasure he had finally managed to discover, and the shared history he had been able to build day after day?
We note that the sentences on marriage and the consequences of adultery are without appeal!
Does Christ not love us?
Is he blind to the fragility of our lives and our love?
Would he present us with an insoluble equation, absurd reasoning and a life that is… unbearable?
All things that are reproached to the Church, but which are in fact aimed at Christ himself and the affirmation He gives!
Perhaps that’s why, in the same discussion, Christ places “a child” in the midst of his listeners… ” If you do not welcome the Kingdom as a child, you will not enter it “, He tells us.
Because it’s a question of “welcoming the Kingdom”?
YES!
It’s not primarily a question of welcoming a morality that may or may not be applicable, or that we might be tempted to water down, or soften… or erase from our consciousness.
The juxtaposition of Christ’s act of setting up a child as a model for welcoming the Kingdom, with the proclamation of the greatness of marriage (for the happiness of the man who needs a spouse to match) is perhaps the “only way” to find our way… and not to be doubly lost as we would be today in the loss of the ideal of a happy life and the desperate confinement in our small means to try to find solutions.
Yes, the greatness of marriage is indeed the answer to our humanity’s most secret thirst for concrete happiness.
As is, even more, the response of divine life incarnate in every man (or woman) who receives Baptism (and Confirmation).
So it’s not just marriage that’s at stake, although that is so important.
What’s at stake is that every human being should be saved, that they should welcome God!
To welcome the Kingdom.
It is the restoration of the human being created in the image and likeness of God that is at stake, and the superabundance of happiness that is offered to us… Not “in spite of” our world, but precisely: “for our life in the situation of today’s world”.
Forgiveness is the response to offence… Service is the response to individualism… Prayer is the response to dryness… or insult… and so on.
That’s why, with the Curé d’Ars, we want to lead each and every inhabitant of Ars (Savigneux or Villeneuve), pilgrims or regular visitors, in the rediscovery of God’s love. Mgr Pierre d’Ornellas (Rennes) reiterated it to us this summer on August 4th: ” Nothing is more conjugal than the human heart and the Word of God.
The Word of God and the human heart are made for each other, and nothing is more appropriate for the two. the incarnation of the Word than the human heart “.
What he said about the Word of God is just as true of divine love… and for the joy of the “human heart”.
Let us ask the Lord to rekindle in us this love… of his love!
So that by receiving it and believing in it, we can marvel at it and enter into a transformed life.