Through God’s grace, commitment to love can endure

Posted: 10.23.09

We were created in the image and likeness of this God who is love. Understanding that we are made in the image and likeness of God can help us then to understand why God put into the humanity of man and woman the vocation – and thus the capacity and the responsibility – of love and communion.

But, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out in his first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est” (“God Is Love”), the word “love” is frequently used and misused. Most commonly, it represents what the ancient Greeks called “Eros”; that is, the erotic love between a man and a woman. But the Church, from her earliest days, proposed a new vision of self-sacrificial love expressed in the word “agape.” The natural human love between a man and a woman is a beautiful and sacred thing, but it needs discipline and maturity, it needs “agape” lest it lose its true dignity and purpose.

Our modern society certainly has exalted “Eros” but at the same time it has also debased the human body and in doing so has impoverished Eros. Eros, reduced to just “sex,” has become a commodity – a mere “thing” to be bought and sold. The lack of modesty, our complacency with the “soft porn” that has invaded our popular culture, is not a sign of our society’s “being at ease” with the body – as opposed to an older generation’s supposed prudish uptightness. Rather, it is a sign of our society’s contempt for the human body. Men and women today consider their bodies and their sexuality are purely material – somehow outside of themselves as if they were “extra baggage or an external shell” and thus to be able to be used and exploited at will.

Eros properly understood, however, does symbolize God’s passionate love for his people – and this Eros that attracts the opposite sexes to one another “leads a man and a woman to marriage, to a bond that is exclusive and therefore monogamous as well as permanent.” This is exactly what Jesus affirms, when quoting the Book of Genesis, he says: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” (Mt 19:5-6)

A balance, between the ecstasy of “Eros” and the unselfish love of agape needs to be re-established if today’s men and women are to respond faithfully to their vocation to love. Of course, a distorted notion of Eros is not a just a product of our modern times. Although man’s vocation is to love, our capacity for love was wounded since that original sin of Adam and Eve. Because of that wound, we find the responsibilities of love very challenging, if not impossible. Even the apostles, when Jesus affirmed the indissolubility of marriage, complained: “If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Mt 19:10).

Today, of course, the hopes that people place in marriage are increasingly fragile in our age of easy divorce. Too many people, especially among our young, are cynical about the possibilities of entering into a joyful and permanent marriage. With the help of God’s grace, however, the commitment of a man and woman to love one another can endure – through the trials and tests of time – until death do they part. The key to regaining such a balance is found in a personal relationship with God and an understanding of the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ.

And this is what makes the Sacrament of Matrimony different from cohabitation or even a civil marriage. As a sacrament, Matrimony is a living and outward sign of Christ’s own love for his bride, the Church. In imitation of Christ, through their unconditional love one for another, the mutual and exclusive fidelity of their love for one another, their love’s openness to life expressed through its fruits – their children and their good works – husbands and wives reflect the love of Christ himself. “Agape” redeems “Eros.”

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