It’s a Sacrament; It’s a Vocation;
It’s a Road map to Heaven!
Sacramental marriage “aims at a deeply personal unity, the unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul.”
—Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio
Marriage can be good. With effort, it can be very good. But it takes God to make the union glorious—a foretaste of heaven, in a sense. God can help you find the glory in lifelong commitment through all the highs and lows. God calls you together, he binds you together in a mystical way through the Sacrament of Matrimony, and he sets you on the path to heaven. He wants husbands and wives to seek each other’s salvation and redemption by offering all they have without holding anything back.
Sacramental Channels of Grace
The first step in cooperating with God’s beautiful plan for our married lives is to realize that “God himself is the author of marriage” (CCC, 1603). In the beginning of human history, God created us for love. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveals the wonderful mystery of our humanity as male and female, designed to become one flesh in the marriage covenant. “Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’ The woman, ‘flesh of his flesh,’ his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a ‘helpmate’; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. ‘Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh’” (CCC, 1605 quoting Gn 2:18–25).
When Jesus came to earth, he raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament, a visible outer sign of an inner grace. In teaching about God’s plan for marriage, Jesus repeated the message of Genesis, insisting that a married couple is “no longer two, but one flesh.” In a stunningly definitive pronouncement, Jesus declared, “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mt 19:6).
Sacramental marriage is more than an agreement that two people will stay together “as long as it works out.” As the Catechism states, “By its very nature the gift of the person must be lasting and irrevocable,” because “love seeks to be definitive; it cannot be an arrangement ‘until further notice’” (CCC, 1646).
The graces of sacramental marriage extend far beyond the bride and groom to the whole community. This lesson came home to us in a rather surprising way on our wedding day. In planning our wedding ceremony, we asked the celebrant to give Holy Communion only to us, so that my Protestant family would not feel left out. But in the middle of the wedding, to our shock and chagrin, the pastor announced that the Eucharist would be offered to all Catholics in a state of grace—and added that non-Catholics could receive a blessing. So people on both sides of the church stood up and approached the altar.
Although we were initially upset at the pastor’s impromptu announcement, we realized later that the ceremony happened exactly as it should have. The center of our wedding Mass was not us and it was not our families. The center of our wedding Mass, like the center of every Mass, was Christ in the Eucharist.
To say that marriage is a sacrament also means that as a married couple you receive special graces from God. As John Paul II stated, “The Spirit which the Lord pours forth gives a new heart, and renders man and woman capable of loving one another as Christ has loved us” (Familiaris Consortio [FC], 13).
This grace of the Holy Spirit, given through the Sacrament of Matrimony, is what makes impossible things possible. It is this grace that will fill you with the strength “to forgive one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to ‘be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,’ and to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love” (CCC, 1642 quoting Eph 5:21).
Seek Help from the Sacraments
These graces of matrimony build in a very real way upon the graces of Baptism and Confirmation (CCC, 1533). Baptism is “the door which gives access to the other sacraments,” meaning that a person must first be baptized in order to receive any of the other sacraments (CCC, 1213). Confirmation completes baptismal grace and enriches us “with a special strength of the Holy Spirit” (CCC, 1285). These sacraments support us in our special mission as married couples—a mission of service to others (CCC, 1533–1534).
Although we can receive Baptism and Confirmation only once, there are other sacraments we can return to again and again for help. These are the Sacraments of the Anointing of the Sick, Penance and Reconciliation, and the Eucharist.
Manny and I have a special fondness for the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, which is available not just to the dying but also to anyone with a life-threatening illness or surgery (CCC, 1514–1515). Manny received the Anointing of the Sick before each of his brain surgeries. This sacrament is meant to bring healing of both the soul and the body, if God wills, renewing the sick person’s faith and removing “the temptation to discouragement and anguish in the face of death” (CCC, 1520). As we well know, the temptation to discouragement and despair is all too real.
While the Anointing of the Sick is one sacrament of healing, the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, commonly called confession, is another. Although the Church obligates us to go only once a year, confession is available as often as needed (CCC, 1457–1458). Many people we know go to confession monthly or even weekly if they’re determined to grow closer to God and progress in their spiritual life.
We’ve found sacramental confession to be absolutely crucial in a marriage. It heals us from sin and helps us to grow in holiness (CCC, 1421, 1426). The grace we receive through this sacrament also helps us to fight temptations or overcome bad habits that are destructive to our marriages. And the more often we confess our sins, the firmer our resolve grows to do right and turn away from wrong.
Sin obstructs the channels through which the sacramental graces of matrimony flow. It clouds our vision and interferes with our ability to hear God’s call. Even something as common as deliberately skipping Sunday Mass can put a stain of sin on our soul. Many people don’t realize that the Church considers skipping Sunday Mass to be a grave (or mortal) sin (CCC, 2181). We astonished our friend Tom when we told him, and he grumbled that he’d committed a lot worse sins in his life. But after he went to confession for it, Tom texted us: “Thanks. Best confession I ever had.”
Confession returns us to a state of grace and allows us to receive Holy Communion worthily (CCC, 1457). “Food cannot profit a body that is dead; neither can Holy Communion, the divine food of the soul, profit a soul that is dead to the grace of God.” Confession heals and enlivens your soul.
This excerpt from The Four Keys to Everlasting Love is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.
Karee Santos is a Catholic blogger and speaker and a writer for the Catholic Match Institute. Manuel Santos, M.D., is a psychiatrist at Mercy Hospital, Rockville Centre, New York.
