Are you one of those who feels that your husband or wife only shows his/her‘bad’side at home? Does it sometimes escape your lips in public when the topic of how calm or patient your spouse is and you say, “You haven’t seen her in her element?”
Well, you’re not alone. If it is a marriage like mine, ten to one you will have this scenario in your marriage and more often that not it will be a bone of contention.
In Scripture, God constantly refers to his love for us, his people, as the love between husband and wife. Can it be true that we reflect the love of God for His people in our marriages?
Yes it is true, the love of God is faithful and forgiving when we constantly sin against him, but this is not only where I believe lies the true nature of the comparison between our spousal love and God’s marriage with His people.
Just as we appear before God just as we are, where He knows our deepest secrets, He sees our true selves behind the numerous masks we put on, behind all the hurt, the pain, the glory, and where we can hide nothing from Him, it is here that we mirror God’s love – appearing unmasked before each other in our marriages!
We start out as star-crossed lovers, finding almost no fault in our beloveds, till we (most of us Catholics!) marry and live together and as in the opening of a Pandora’s box discover the faults fly out one by one, or simply that the star-crossed glasses fall off and we see each other as we really are. We peel off every layer, one by one (and not just figuratively) and we are naked before each other, no one else. We start to see the good, the bad and the ugly and even that big blue birth mark on the left rear seat!
However, as Christian couples, because our marriage is a sacrament, we can draw on the graces flowing from its uniquely covenantal nature. Every marriage and family since the dawn of time is stamped with the Godly nature of His Trinitarian relationship, (but that is another topic.) As Jesus gave His life for His bride the church, so too we give our lives for each other, body and blood, heart and soul.
When we see that God is in our midst, as He first showed us how to love, we see this tendency to reveal even the dark sides of our personalities as sacramental and precious, accepting that we need healing, love and acceptance, and the healing power of the other sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist.
We often need a third-party mediator, the support of family, counseling, therapy and much needed healing from priests and anointed persons. But with all this intervention, for the grace of the sacrament of marriage to work there must be the healing of forgiveness, from the little hurts and transgressions to the big ones.
This is the Fount of Grace in our marriage. No matter what the hurt, if openness, communication, dialogue and forgiveness do not take place, the revelation of our dark sides to each other leads to further breakdown of trust and even love and eventually the marriage itself. So often I have felt love and peace miraculously flow into my heart after I decided to forgive my spouse after a few hours of wrestling with my tearful feelings of anger, reasoning it impossible to see him right.
Does God abandon us, even though we are sinful? How many times did he forgive the unfaithfulness of the people of Israel
It is in His forgiveness that we are healed, and we can move on. It is in forgiveness of each other that we can be healed too, and move on, past the faults of our spouses and rediscover the beauty of what we saw from the beginning of our relationship.
As we reveal our selves to each other each time we ‘rub corners’, clash personalities, ‘fight and make up’, approach each other in humility, forgive and move on, we grow as persons, even in maturity as we age. In our faith journey we grow, albeit at our own paces, advancing each other on the path to heaven. If we truly draw on the resources of our faith for our marriage, it is our spouses that actually take us to heaven!
Often patience, forbearance, endurance and fortitude is cultivated in marriages where one partner, if not both, has especially rough corners to smooth out. In thus reflecting the marriage of God to his people in Christian marriage, us husbands and wives fashion each other into the image and likeness of God, if we so allow it.
On my faith journey and state of maturity I know for sure that I have grown tremendously in my 19 years of marriage. Many years before we were married my husband said, “I hope you never change” and I was sure this couldn’t be possible, but I never imagined how disappointed he would be once the honeymoon was over that I had a streak of anger in me.
For the most part I was a patient person but could burst a neat blood vessel when I was so riled up. He too disappointed me by what he was that I did not know before. While in defense I often used the line, that he “brought out the worst in me” I did not justify any of my behaviour (to myself, but often to him I did!) and the anger and many other faults I have tried to overcome with healing and God’s grace.
We strived to keep in mind what we learnt at the Engaged Encounter weekend before we married “Let not the sun go down on your anger”. And though it may have taken a couple of suns going down, each time we always made some sort of deadline!
My need for God deepened as often I felt alone, and my search for His presence, His Word, strengthened with all that married life brought on; the storms and deserts, mountains and valleys, joys and celebrations and I am now in a much better place than I was 20 years ago.
Our marriage has passed the early and seemingly unending period of disillusionment, having only as recently worked out old issues and we walk in harmony a lot more now, to the praise and glory of God.
If God has fashioned me thus at this point of time knowing I have miles to go, I have tremendous hope in the future -- for what the daily living out of my marriage, journeying with our five beloved children and what life itself will make of me, and of my dear spouse, who God has covenanted to me for my own, when we both finally see Him face to face.
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