Reading Francis

I posted this on Facebook, but then the whole Laurel v Yanny thing blew up, so nobody had time for this. I get it. Since then I’ve added a little (to make it, you know, even longer).

Some of you know I play a small role in the marriage preparation process at our church. I have been doing this long enough that I’ve seen a few trends; for instance, lots more couples who met online (and tend to do well on the assessment I go over).

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that younger Millennials are quick to offer suggestions to the Church about how to make the process more relevant to them. Recently, a couple suggested the Church would do a better job of attracting couples if we downplayed the whole “Christ-centric” thing.

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Anyhoo, they liked the way I explained how Catholics understand marriage better than they liked the official messaging. Earlier in our conversation, I shared an abbreviated version of the line of reasoning that I posted when a favorite FB personality asked if he and his girlfriend should get married. (Incidentally, let’s agree: if you are asking your million+ FB followers whether to get married, the answer should be a hard no.) Here’s what I said there, for what it’s worth:

“Here’s another way to think about marriage: Committing to another person is an acknowledgement that you need their help to become your best self, and in return helping them become their best self is a purpose you want to take on. But just as you need each other to be your best selves, you need the support of your community of friends and family to keep you going in that commitment when things get hard (and you want your friends and family to celebrate with you when it’s not so hard). That’s what marriage is – inviting your community to join you in support of your commitment to each other. (Upon which, for some believers, you layer on the support of the divine Lover.)

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Now, to the Church couple, I added that this is what we mean when we say our vocation is to help our spouse grow in holiness or get to heaven. (And, later, I told them the whole “Christ-centric” thing was really just truth in advertising, at least for couples seeking to get married in the Church.)

Later in our conversation, the couple asked about the Christ-centered thing: How does that play out? So I said, look, April and I don’t have it all figured out or anything, but we pray together every day, morning, evening, night. (I didn’t think to also say): And we pray for each other throughout the day. And we support each other in growing in our faith as individuals, and we center some of our time together to catching up about what that growth has looked like, so it can inspire and inform the other one, and so we can support each other in the way God is working in us individually. And (this part did come up at another point of the conversation) we set aside time for just-us to do deep dive catching up and exploring how God is working in our marriage and where he is calling us to change together.

Anyway, I am sharing because I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge about marriage. Except when I reflect on the fact I didn’t really understand it 25+ years ago.

I had a realization after talking to another couple. The couples that are making it to the point of marriage want to know some of this stuff. They want to be prepared for marriage. They *know* that they prep for careers for years and do continuing ed, even though a crappy job is exponentially less miserable than a crappy marriage, and a phenomenal job pales in comparison to a phenomenal marriage, yet we offer little training and no CEUs for the latter. I wish I had the bandwidth to offer the little bit we’ve figured out so far. If I did, it would be to point to the thing that I almost never tell the couples I meet with, which is the point I made above about the real vocation of marriage.