In November 1995, at a colloquium on the theme Spirituality of the Permanent Sacrament, Professor Gisbert Greshake from Freiburg in Bresgau gave an introductory lecture on marriage spirituality. Here we publish an extract as a sample of how dogmatic theologians approach marriage in our time. The full lecture has been published in INTAMS REVIEW Autumn 1996.
The search for happiness
"Happiness", the objective of human marriage in general, is also a motto for explicitly christian marital spirituality. According to christian belief, the spouses should "have life, and have it abundantly". Therefore, what christian tradition says about marriage is not principally different from a spirituality of marriage (in the widest sense) which humanity in general is striving for; it is an inexhaustible and unsurpassable potential of hope and orientation which wants marriage to enjoy a definite and happy success.
What are now - beyond the specific differences in christian spiritualities - the common structures of a christian marital spirituality?
These common structures result from the fact that marriage as a form of life and especially as a sacrament, when it is lived consequently, urges the spouses to live their faith in a specific way, i.e. that they, while reading together the Holy Scripture, "underline" certain passages of it in a different way than unmarried christians would do. I will try to sketch some of these structures belonging to marital spirituality.
Fundamental structural elements of marital spirituality.
Married persons go their way together in faith. This has a double consequence. On the one hand, it is about togethemess: people start together to search for God, together they try to follow Christ, together they share their ideas, together they pray, together they are sent into the world which is a basic element for christian belief. Thus, marital spirituality will ernphasize in a particular way that the togetherness in living faith is a communion.
Moreover, marriage will be understood as a symbol of God himself in the tri-une communion.
On the other hand, this togethemess is a way to go, ie. it is a process and its starting-point is not yet the end. The spouses have to learn if necessary in a troublesome process - that the loved partner is and will ever be the "other", not the creation of my dreams and projections, but someone whose individuality is strictly to be respected. For this reason, on-going practice and patience are necessary. The process of being married demands that the partners communicate to each other the needs they have, that they take up, respect and frankly pronounce the wishes of the other without violating or hurting him/her. All this has to be learned. In a continuous and open dialogue, the partners can together come to terms regarding their wishes, demands, claims and criticisms.
Wherever people, in this world, live their life together in such an intensive process as marriage is, there will necessarily be conflict, quarrels, and confrontation. This means that reconciliation and the willingness to start anew and to endure and accept each other, is of much greater importance within marriage than, for instance, within the life of a single person. Therefore, it seems to me, that reconciliation, coming from the power of the Cross and of Resurrection, is one of the most important focal points in marital spirituality.
Marriage aims at lifelong fidelity, in which one partner accepts the other without "ifs" or "buts". In the 70s, the synod of the German dioceses has written: "A human being is not really accepted, unless someone accepts him just as much in his frailty and weakness, and accepts him with all the burden which has been put on him in the course of his life, through his fault or not. Nor is this acceptance dependent on how the other person develops or what occurs to him. It is valid forever."
Everybody is searching, from the bottom of his or her heart, for this kind of fidelity. According to recent opinion polls among young adults, fidelity is one of the highest values; in our fast-moving, disobliging and irresolute times, it is a spiritual challenge of the first order. Wherever in our society spouses live this fidelity out of the power of their faith, more precisely: out of God's unconditional "yes" to their partnership, they bear irreplaceable witness to the Holy Spirit's acting today, enabling people to live together in fidelity. In this sense, marital spirituality is - at least in current society - a spirituality of fidelity, to be lived deliberately and in public as a symbol.
On the grounds of the sacramental character of marriage, married people are invited in a particular way to discover and live the love of God via the love of the partner and via reciprocal love.
In addition to that, reciprocal love realizes itself in a corporeal and sexual way, i.e. as marital encounter embodied in the language of love. Therefore, marital spirituality is particularly sensitive to corporeal signs, and in this way pursues what sacramentality fundamentally means. The spouses are called to see and discover in visible signs and actions what lies behind, ultimately the love of God.
Note well: this is not only true for the private field of intimacy, but also for the wideness of creation and history. To discover and to live in visible signs invisible things: this is exactly the spiritual dimension which should be lived by married persons in an intensive way, for they are joined together in the sacrament, which is the visible sign of an invisible reality.
Ultimately, marriage is also the primitive cel1 of the Church. That means that marriage first, and then also family, are closer to church and refer more obviously to the ecclesiological structure of faith than a single person's life does. Marital spirituality means to be church en miniature and to regard the larger church as a field of tasks.
All these five aspectsI consider to be common basic propositions and basic structures of marital spirituality. These can be realized in various types of marital spiritualities and in different manners, according to the individual vocation, to the concrete situation and also to specific personal options and preferences; and yet they define a common framework and a common foundation.
Other related documents you might want to read:
Link to our partners: the International Academy for Marriage Spirituality. Their email address is intams@skynet.be.
. . .
