The scary fidelity of Jesus
Garvey, Michael
THE SCARY FIDELITY OF JESUS WHAT MAKES MARRIAGE POSSIBLE? I agree with David O'Brien that "sex is not our most taboo topic; love is." But I'm not particularly troubled by the reticence. Some...
...In the admittedly limited experience my wife and I have had of Catholic marriage preparation classes and pre-Cana programs, there has been much forthright discus-sion of sex, love, and day-to-day living arrangements but little of marriage...
...As an experiment, merge the lives of two good-hearted kids whose premarital inventories or Meyers-Briggs tests or whatever the ribbon clerks make them take these days are absolutely indistinguishable from each other...
...The appropriate work of a pre-Cana ministry is first of all to scare the living bejazus out of young candidates for matrimony by helping them gauge the enormous-ness of its claim on them, and then, if they remain undeterred, to assure them that despite the insanity of what they are undertaking, others have preceded them in the enterprise and been liberated from their self-centeredness...
...It isn't, and shouldn't be, an easy thing to discuss married love-what it is like to be seen and seen through and forgiven by another human being and to see and see through and forgive her...
...My grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, along with the Dominican nuns who taught me in elementary school, the Benedictine monks who taught me in secondary school, the Holy Cross priests and layfolk who taught me at Notre Dame, to say nothing of the woman I sleep with, have all seemed to agree on the subject of marriage...
...Far easier to talk about the turbulent and unpredictable enthusiasm you both happily share for the spasmodic twitching of a few abdominal nerves...
...According to this variegated batch, whose unanimity consti-tutes as authentic a magisterium as I'll ever listen to, marriage means that one man and one woman stake their lives in the name of God on mutual, unconditional, and lifelong fidelity...
...Those were the days when the magisterium wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade...
...And that's a waste...
...They learn, in other words, that Sartre is absolutely right about hell being the other...
...Some things are kept private because they are embarrassing to talk about and embarrassing to talk about because they should be kept private...
...And you often find people-rather, people often find you, who are all too willing to talk about their experiences of love...
...The marriage vow-and I don't see how there can be a more demanding one-bears witness to any onlooker in the universe of a couple's shared belief that the birth, death, and Resurrection of Jesus are more potent and revealing than the much overrated virtue of prudence, which would regard their commitment as crazy...
...It seems to me that too many pre-Cana programs sweat too much of the small stuff like the changing relationship of the sexes in our time, Anyone interested can find out about all that by reading the newsweeklies and watching television...
...and finally to help forge marriages which have something to do with real secular contracts made and broken by our agnostic friends...
...I'm not sure that this scary fidelity of Jesus, the unique and dangerous ingredient in a Christian marriage, can be neatly distinguished from love, but I think that too little is heard among us about it...
...I'm not sure that the older Catholics can talk to younger Catholics any more effectively...
...I suspect that the jive we hear these days regarding gender roles, numbers of careers, and die spacing of children arises from a sort of bashfulness about the central ferocity of the marriage promise...
...As celebrated among Catholics, marriage is pretty much a fanaticism...
...MICHAEL GARVEY...
...They've got their sexual tastes, expectations, jobs, and housekeeping responsibilities all doped out perfectly...
...But what they can talk about is marriage, which isn't exactly the same thing as love...
...Or, as my motherput it when I was sitting in a highchair and fooling with a bowl of Gerbers one morning, she and my dad had promised to do all in their power to get each other to heaven...
...Which might be why we Catholics, like most other contemporary Americans, seem to expect so little from our marriages...
...Whatever else it is, marriage is not safe, and that isn't sufficiently emphasized in the discussions and pamphlets...
...The prob-lem may be that too many of the pre-Cana ministers and too many of the rest of us are insufficiently convinced or have forgotten that the 'presence of Christ in marriage makes all things possible...
...Some of the funniest moments in the movie Airplane, for instance, involve a1 man who provokes several uninterested fellow airline passengers to suicide with his lengthy and de-tailed descriptions of a troubled affair...
...If they haven't been taught to turn reflexively to the Cross and Resur-rection at these impossible stressful moments, their marriage (unless, of course, they are both wimps) will disintegrate...
...Now lob into their married life any surprises you can think of: healthy babies, blighted babies, miscarriages, alcoholism, adulteries, frigidity, depressions, Alzheimers, adolescents, cats, and unpleasant chewing noises at the table...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 6
