Marriage & the Marriage Vows

We all know marriage (Christian marriage, Catholic Marriage, any religiously sanctioned marriage) involves making sacred promises to another.

But do we really get what those promises involve?

Do we really understand — meaning grasp, deeply comprehend — that we are not making promises about how we will forever feel towards the other person, but rather about how we will forever treat the other person. And that is with the utmost Love. We are promising that WE WILL Love, honor, and cherish. WE WILL respect and forgive and be present. In bad times, perhaps even very bad times; in poverty; and through all forms of sickness, be they physical, mental, spiritual, cultural.

When we say the marital vows, we are expressing very personal commandments that we have and are co-authoring with God. These I WILLs that we say in the marriage vows are our new THOU SHALTS.

But for most of us, our own inner Thou is something whose existence is tenuous at best, and who presence is very easily snuffed out or covered over in this world by the world, with all of its distractions and enticements and temptations, with all its deception and glitter and emotionally seductive and alluring offerings and false promises.

And yet against all of this the marital vows stand and take their stand, as do we with them.

The marital vows are moral obligations we freely and soberly take upon ourselves that predefine how we are going to consistently and reliably show up, and fight to show up, to the marriage, to this newly sanctified sacred relationship. We are stating publicly and before God what we can from here on out (till death do us part) be counted on to do — especially — especially — when the going gets tough. When the going gets tough — as it surely will — we are not going to cowardly bail out, cut our losses and run and save ourselves — save our smaller self; rather, we are going to stay and fight and if anything lose or willingly and heroically sacrifice our smaller self, our amoral or immoral ego-centered self, and instead rise to the occassion by putting on the garb of our future larger more saintly and virtuous self, the self steeped in the virtues, the virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Meaningful Endurance, Forgiveness, Mercy, Faith, Hope, Charity, Patience, Understanding, Generosity, Conscience. No longer are we going to show up to life — and especially not our marriage — as a mere mortal, a mere human, or even as a scoundrel, as someone amoral or immoral. Rather, with the saying of the marital vows we are very publicly declaring that we are, from here on out, going to be showing up to life and our marriage as a saint — or at least as someone who is firmly and meaningfully on that path.

With the professing of the marital vows we are making a moral claim about who we are and who we deliberately intend to become. Not a coward. Not a runner-away-er. Certainly not an adulterer. Nor a scapegoater and abnegater of personal responsibility and agency. And definitely not a liar. But an upright, morally grounded and centered human being committed to becoming more saintly and more Godly, a person fiercely committed to being a conduit of God’s love to the other person and to the children.

Fiercely committed. Not lukewarmly committed. Fiercely committed. Marriage is a mission. It requires mission posture out of us. Mission focus. Mission execution. A mentality where we “sweat more in training so we bleed less in battle.” Anything less and we will backslide from future saintliness to being a liar and aligning ourselves with the Father of the lies. Or we will stall out, be dead in the water, and inertia will claim us, all because we were ignorant of the depths of what we have promised. And in that case, we are in need of serious moral and spiritual education and we need to surround ourselves with more Godly and saintly influences, and pray for the Holy Spirit to come to us and lead us to all truth.

Love is not a feeling. It is a capacity, an ability, an act of will because it involves a deep and meaningful submission to the Will of the only One who is Love, whose very Being is Love, and whose Will is the only Will under whose divine tutelage our will can learn how to actually and genuinely Love another, our spouse, our children, in a Godly way, a self-sacrificial (of the smaller self) way, and not in an emotionally exploitative and self-referential way.