In a society that finds its foundation, marriage, crumbling, one can’t help but ask why so many marriages fail. There is no shortage of theories—a search of the internet yields close to 22 million hits and counting. They usually boil down broadly speaking to a few categories related to economics, communication and emotional availability. While these may be the reasons listed, they are mere symptoms of the real cause. Marriages fail when marriage itself becomes an idol.
As Christians, we believe marriage is sacred, not just because it was instituted by God, but because it was instituted to serve as the primordial sacrament. Marriage, for anyone with even a modicum of Biblical knowledge, is the primary image that God uses to describe His relationship with mankind. He proposes throughout the Old Testament (c.f. Is 62:5), marries mankind in the Incarnation, consummates it on the Cross (John 19:30) and invites all of creation to the wedding feast (Rev 19:7). All of this however is prefigured in the opening words of Genesis.
Marriage in the Beginning
When Adam is made, he is given dominion over all the earth. He has everything at his disposal, and yet He is alone with no one to share it with. He looks at the animals, and, despite them being bodily creatures like himself, he is unable to find a suitable mate to share those things with. Then God puts Adam into a deep sleep and from his rib He creates Eve. When Adam looks upon her he knows he has found that mate because, even though she has a body like the animals, there is something different about her as well.
What is it that is different? Through her body, he discerns two things. First that she is a person and no mere animal—a person made in the image and likeness of God. Second, that because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he is made for communion with her and vice versa. In seeing the image of God, the image that sets her apart from the animals, and knowing that he is made for communion with her, he knows that he is ultimately knows that his communion is an image of the communion that he is to have with God. It is considered the “primordial sacrament” because it is a sign of the ultimate communion that is to come—the one flesh communion of God and man in the Incarnation and the communion of saints with the communion of the Trinity.
This natural desire that Adam experienced, this same natural desire to unite in marriage that we all experience, is meant to serve as a signpost to the infinite desire to be united to God. But living outside of Eden the sign has faded. Now two fallen people come together and are mostly just trying to get along. Getting along even though they came into the nuptial pact expecting that infinite desire, the same desire that drove them to marriage in the first place, to be fulfilled. This is why Our Lord saw the need to elevate it to the status of a Sacrament and repaint the sign in his Blood. Now the Sacrament brings about the thing signified, union between the spouses in Christ begets union with Christ.
But even when it is not received as a Sacrament it is still a sacrament. And herein lies the problem. Whenever an image is confused for the real thing, the image becomes an idol. When marriage is entered into with the expectation that it will lead to ultimate fulfilment it is doomed to fail. The image/idol disorientation is what has lead many people to give up on marriage completely. Once it becomes an idol it is emptied of its meaning. Even those who decide to get married are in a precarious position because in idolizing it they are expecting their spouse to fill the God-sized whole in their heart. When the emotional newness and excitement wears off, or their spouse turns out to be less than they were expecting (and how could they not have been?) or when someone else stimulates that excitement, they blame their spouse for not fulfilling their needs. They are expecting their spouse to bear an infinite weight and are ultimately disappointed when they can’t. The failure to see this is why most people who get divorced once do so multiple times afterwards.
Raising Expectations
To think everything that has been said so far is simply a summons to lower expectations is to miss the point. In fact it is the exact opposite. Again as the primordial sacrament it still points to the thing signified—the union between Christ and the Church. Instead marriage must be modeled upon that. What does that mean practically? First that the spouses must be willing to give of themselves completely to each other. We only find meaning in life by making a sincere gift of ourselves (Gaudium et Spes, 24). We only find ourselves by giving ourselves away and marriage is the place where this happens for most of us. Marriage as an idol is focused merely on what we get out of it and when the ledger goes into the red it is time to move on. But marriage as a sign means giving.
Marriage is not only giving, it is also taking—as in “do you take X to be your lawfully wedded …?” Christ not only gives but receives. Marriage requires not just a gift of self, but a reception of the other person’s gift. This means seeing the other person as a gift and receiving the gift, brokenness and all. Christ receives His Bride the Church with all her blemishes so that she might be made holy and spotless (c.f. Eph 5:25-30). It is this receiving of the other that is usually the most difficult in practice. And it is only when you see marriage as a sign, a faded and blurry sign at times, and not as an idol, that it is even possible.
Christians unfortunately have failed to live marriage as a sign to the world. It began when Luther de-Sacramentalized marriage making it essentially a secular institution. The Church still recognizes all valid marriages between Baptized Christians as a Sacrament precisely so that the grace of the Sacrament can overcome the secularizing weight. This secularizing of marriage has even crept into Catholic circles and is really at the heart of the push for giving Communion to those in irregular unions. Now the sign must become a counter-sign to the world and we must, as Catholics, let the truth of marriage shine forth.