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In erotic or selfish love, the burdens of others are regarded as impeding one's own happiness. But in Christian love, burdens become opportunities to serve. That is why the symbol of Christian love is not the circle circumscribed by self, but the cross with its arms outstretched to infinity to embrace all humanity within its grasp. But despite love's best effort, there is no control over a partner. What if the husband becomes an alcoholic, or unfaithful, or beats his wife and children? What if the wife becomes nagging or unfaithful, or neglects her children? Should there not be a separation? Yes, under certain circumstances there may be a separation but this does not give the offended party the right to contract a new marriage. "What God, then, has joined, let not man put asunder." (Matt. 19:6)
Another problem is resolving the trials and sorrows, the disillusionments and tears, which sometimes come to married life. Certainly not by allowing a man or woman, who has got some other woman or man into a hole, to be free to get other people into other holes; for if society will not let a man live as he pleases, why should it let him love as he pleases? Neither is the solution to be found in claiming that another person is "vital" for happiness. If desire takes precedence over right and honor, then how prevent future rapes of Poland, or the stealing of a bicycle? How circumvent any passion becoming the basis of usurpation, which is the ethics of barbarism?
Suppose the promise of marriage "for better or for worse" turns out for the worse; suppose either husband or wife becomes a chronic invalid, or develops antisocial characteristics. In such cases, no carnal love can save it. It is even difficult for a personal love to save it, particularly if the other party becomes undeserving. But when these lower loves break down, Christian love steps in to suggest that the other person is to be regarded as a gift of God. Most of God's gifts are sweet; a few of them, however, are bitter. But whether that other person be bitter or sweet, sick or well, young or old, he or she is still a gift of God, for whom the other partner must sacrifice himself or herself. Selfish love would seek to get rid of the other person because he is a burden. Christian love takes on the burden, in obedience to the Divine Command: "Bear the burden of one another's failings; then you will be fulfilling the law of Christ." (Gal. 6:2)
And if it be objected that God never intended that anyone should live under such difficulties, the answer very flatly is that He does: "If any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce self, and take up his cross, and follow me. The man who tries to save his life shall lose it; it is the man who loses his life for my sake that will secure it." (Matt. 16:24, 25) What sickness is to an individual, an unhappy marriage may be to a couple: a trial sent by God in order to perfect them spiritually. Without some of the bitter gifts of God, many of our spiritual capacities would be undeveloped. As the Holy Word of God tells us: "We are confident even over our afflictions, knowing well that affliction gives rise to endurance, and endurance gives proof of our faith, and a proved faith gives ground for hope. Nor does this hope delude us the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom we have received." (Romans 5:3-5)
Such a marriage may be a kind of martyrdom, but at least the one who practices Christian love can be sure that he is not robbing another soul of its peace, nor his own life of honor. This acceptance of the trials of marriage is not a sentence to death, as some believe. The soldier is not sentenced to death because he takes the oath to his country but he admits that he is ready to face death rather than lose honor. An unhappy marriage is not a condemnation to unhappiness; it is a noble tragedy in which one bears the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," rather than deny a vow made to the Living God. Being wounded for the country we love is noble; but being wounded for the God we love is nobler still.
Christian love, on the part of one spouse, will help redeem the other partner. God must have His Saints not where all is pleasant, but most of all where saints are least appreciated and hated. St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: "The brethren who are with me send you their greetings; greeting, too, from all the saints, especially those who belong to the Emperor's household." What these saintly souls were to the entrenched evil of Nero's household, namely, its cleansing atmosphere and its redeeming heart, the Christian spouse will be toward the other; the good influence in an environment that might be as evil as Caesar's palace. If a father will pay his son's debts to keep him out of prison, if a man will give a blood transfusion to save his friend's life, then it is possible in marriage for a spouse to redeem a spouse.
As the Scriptures tell us: "The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife; and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband." (1 Cor. 7:14) This is one of the most forgotten texts on the subject of marriage. It applies to the spiritual order the common experiences of the physical. If a husband is ill, the wife will nurse him back to health. In the spiritual order, the one who has faith and love of God will take on the burdens of the unbeliever, such as drunkenness, infidelity, and mental cruelty, for the sake of his soul. What a blood transfusion is to the body, reparation for the sins of another is to the spirit. Instead of separating when there are difficulties and trials, the Christian solution is to bear the other as a cross for the sake of his sanctification. The wife can redeem the husband, and the husband the wife.
This transferability of sanctification from a good wife to a bad husband, or from a good husband to a bad wife, follows from the fact that they are two in one flesh. As skin can be grafted from the back to the face, so merit can be applied from spouse to spouse. This spiritual communication may not have the romantic satisfaction in it that carnal communication has, but its returns are eternal. Many a husband and wife after infidelities and excesses will find themselves saved on Judgment Day, as the faithful partner never ceased to pour out prayers for his or her salvation. St. Peter confirms this idea: "You, too, who are wives must be submissive to your husbands. Some of these still refuse credence to the word; it is for their wives to win them over, not by word but by example; by the modesty and reverence they observe in your demeanour. Your beauty must lie, not in braided hair, not in gold trinkets, not in the dress you wear, but in the hidden features of your hearts, in a possession you can never lose, that of a calm and tranquil spirit; to God's eyes, beyond price. It was thus that the holy women of old time adorned themselves, those women who had such trust in God, and paid their husbands such respect. Think how obedient Sara was to Abraham, how she called him her lord; if you would prove yourselves her children, live honestly, and let no anxious thoughts disturb you. You, too, who are husbands must use marriage considerately, paying homage to woman's sex as weaker than your own. The grace of eternal life belongs to both, and your prayers must not suffer interruption." (1 Peter 3:1-7)
Most marriages fail not because of infidelity or because of selfishness, but because of the refusal to make sacrifices when needed, or through expecting the other party will always enter into one's moods with reciprocity and simultaneity. Sometimes moods cannot be reciprocated. Then it is that Christian love climbs to the peak, counting its sweet sorrow a cheap price to pay for the blissful monopoly of loving while yet unloved, desiring, like Paul, to spend itself and to be spent for others, feigning all faults as its own, being dismissed if the other's contentment is isolation, putting love in the one who is apparently not lovable, and thus finding him lovable, as God finds us lovable because He first put His love in us.
The Christian answer in trial is to love one another for Christ's sake. Peace would reign if neither became angry at the same time, if they never retired without prayers together, nor met without a warm welcome, nor parted without reluctance, nor failed to see in the other an opportunity to manifest that love that came from the Cross. "This is the greatest love a man can show, that he should lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)
Love on pilgrimage would then march with winged feet back again to the great flame of God, ever realizing this profound truth that the greatest mistake in life is in seeking to be loved. May it not be true after all, that only in the degree that we love, shall we be loved? Given this Christian love which puts love where it does not find it, then in any marriage, bitter or sweet, there will be at least one of the partners who can say with Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Since the blessings and happiness of married life need no elaboration, but the trials and crosses of life do, it is necessary to penetrate more deeply into the spirit of sacrifice. Here we assume at the beginning not only the "worse" mentioned in the formula "for better or for worse," but even the worst; Whether it be a wife struck down with illness the day after marriage, or a ruined home full of children after twenty years of married life, makes little difference. The important question is: "How interpret and accept these trials in a truly Christian spirit?" No human being has a choice of whether he will go through life with or without suffering, because this is to a great extent beyond his control. But each one has this choice: Will the suffering open on a Cross and therefore see the joy beyond, or will it be closed to the Cross and therefore be the beginning of hell on earth?
The great difference between a Christian and a pagan in suffering is that for the Christian all suffering is from the outside; that is, it is a trial permitted by God for self-purification and sanctification. For the pagan, suffering is on the inside; it is in his soul in his mind, in his consciousness, in his unconsciousness; it is so much a part of him that it is a hell, though that hell often goes by the name of "anxiety" or "frustration." The Christian receives suffering, he even speaks of it as coming from the hands of the Crucified; the pagan creates suffering. Because he cannot see its place in the universe, because it negates his egotism, and because it cancels his love of pleasure, he begets an inferno within himself. The crosses from the outside are bearable; the double-crosses inside are insoluble. In the latter case, even where there is a nominal belief in God, the sufferer will unconsciously betray his egotism with the query: "Why does God do this to me?"
Pure suffering is what is seen as coming from the Crucified Hands. Impure suffering is what the mind sees when it is in rebellion against itself. In this sense, the Oriental philosophers were right in regarding suffering as a kind of an illusion. They are illusions to the extent that they are of the non-soul given for the sake of the soul. Being extraneous to the soul which possesses the joy of union with God, they are "only the shade of His Hand outstretched caressingly." When Our Divine Lord stretches out His Arms in wide embrace, with the sun behind Him, what falls upon earth is the shadow of His Cross. The more the sun is behind Him, the greater is the length and breadth of the Gross. To just the extent that we turn our backs to Him Who is the Light of the World, the greater becomes the Cross. The farther we walk away from Him, the more the Cross lengthens, until we reach a point where we may begin to identify ourselves with our shadow. This is sometimes called "psychoneurosis," though it is nothing but the pursuit of the superficial self, in which the personality possessed with a soul made for God becomes confused with the shadow of self caused by an externalization of oneself through an undue concern with things outside. When the point is reached where wealth, pleasure, power, sex, and publicity, which are only the shadows of real values, become identified with personality, then begins that series of queer mental states which end in despair on a psychoanalytic couch.
But as the soul turns around to the Light of the World, the illusions vanish. Eventually, a moment is reached when there is no longer a shadow on love, but an identity with Christ best expressed by Paul: "And yet I am alive; or rather, not I; it is Christ that lives in me." (Gal. 2:20)
The key to the solution of crosses of married life, if they come, is not in the breaking of the bond, for that is unbreakable. Rather, it is the utilization of its sufferings for self, for children, and for the spouse, who for the present at least is the cause of the suffering. Christian love not only can make such suffering bearable; it can even make it sweet. The love of God voluntarily ended in a Cross; but it did not conquer Him, because it came from without: "He suffered under Pontius Pilate." The Christian, in like manner, sees that if Innocence did not spurn the Cross, then somehow or other it must fit into his life which is far from innocent. Eternal Love has no Cross. But once it takes on a human nature and enters into a spatio-temporal environment, it exposes itself to a Cross. A cross is nothing else but want of love, or better still, it is anti-love. The refusal to love Love is Crucifixion. The noblest love of a spouse can be exposed to the negation of love, because if love is not returned by the other spouse, it is no reason for abandoning love altogether. When a husband gives up an unloving wife, or an unloving wife gives up an unloving husband, there is a denunciation of love in the universe, a betrayal of the Love of God Who loved us even while we were sinners. Granted that fidelity to the bond would not make such love revive in time, it must not be forgotten that there is an eternity, and faithful love can redeem unfaithful love.
As God does not coerce our free soul, but woos it, so there is a warm prayer-wooing in marriage, even when the heart-wooing has long since grown cold. All over this earth, even in little apartments, houses, and tiny hovels, there are free wills that make themselves little gods. Christ felt their rebellion in Gethsemane and feels their non-serviam now in His Mystical Body, but He does not let go His love for such souls. Magdalens and penitent thieves will still return, so long as the door of love is left open. If, then, husband and wife reflect the love of Christ by continuing to love, even in disaster, sickness, or trial, it will be as redemptive as His Love. In the end, they will count their sufferings nothing but a feeble payment of their debt to Him.
Love is the expansion of being. Want of love, even when one is unloved, is a decrease of being. If suffering enters love, it is to be accepted as a purification of both husband and wife. When accepted as redemptive, a great joy takes possession of the soul. This joy is rather difficult to explain, but its secret probably is this: suffering enters into me, but I do not enter into suffering. If I entered into suffering, there would be an externalization of personality. Just as a person loses something of himself by being absorbed in alcohol or sex, so the soul loses something in being possessed by suffering. The spirit is impoverished through a loss of immanent or self-contained activity, which is the attribute of life. But when suffering enters into me, it becomes an enrichment of the spirit, as knowledge is the ennoblement of the mind. What comes into a man is mastered by man. And as the mind changes the nature of a flower by knowing it, giving it a mental existence instead of a plant existence, so suffering assimilated by the soul in union with Christ changes its nature and actually becomes joy.
But only Christ-conscious souls have the power to effect this transformation. An animal cannot know "goodness" as such, but only this good water, or that good thing; but man can, because he has the power of abstracting the universal from the particular. The pagan, seeing the gold mixed with dross, throws away the treasure because he has no knowledge of how to refine it. The Christian, however, can extract the Divine gold from the dross of suffering and thus add to the wealth of his Christian character. Suffering then becomes assimilable to the soul through the power of the Cross. But to the worldling, it becomes a double-cross; inside as an intellectual complexity incapable of solution, and outside as a violent intrusion and disturbance of one's egotism. The man without faith is no more immune from a cross than the man with faith. The difference is that the Christian has only one Cross, which is so understandable, while the egotist has two crosses, whose names are Rebellion and Suffering. A moment can actually be reached by the Christian when his suffering is felt less and less as coming from the outside, or as being imposed on him, and more and more as a failure to accomplish perfectly within himself the Will of God.
The cross that was given from the outside can be now offered from the inside by the Christian as part of his very self, as something so vital to his self-development in Christ that he would feel the poorer without it. To the onlooker, it seems like suffering; to the Christ-lover, it is joy; just as to the unmarried, an infant is the sum of economic expense, confinement, tears, baby sitters, measles, and worry, but to the father and mother it is a joy and a benediction. The child, viewed as an object external to self, is a burden; but seen as a subject, it is a prolongation of personality and the fleshly symbol of their love.
No believer in an abstract Deity or a vague Power behind the universe can comprehend this mystery of joy in suffering, for such a God reigns but does not govern. He asks no sacrifice, therefore He does not dignify man, who wants to love by giving. On the lower levels of reason, without faith in the Redemptive Cross, man is unarmed to live and understand his life. What he calls "fate," or "bad luck," or "misfortune," or "incompatibility," is looked upon as a resistance to his ego. To the Christ-dominated soul, these seeming contradictions are seen in relation to the totality of God's plan, or as invisible rays of light putting man in touch with the sound and video of Heaven's eternal purposes. Life then becomes a conquest of unity, a progressive triumph over distraction and digression. In marriage, the union of husband and wife is seen first as co-operation; with the birth of children, it becomes corporation. If joys come, then it is con-corporation with Christ in His Glory, but if sorrow comes, it is as incorporation to His Cross. But the husband and wife who would set limits to their creative love, and determine exactly the minimum number of concrete living objects to which their love will extend, necessarily incapacitate themselves to embrace a cross. Nothing so untrains a soul as the limitation of creative goodness. Such rationalization of love, or perhaps better its atomization, can never grasp those suprarational joys which come from accepting everything from God's Hands, whether it be a child, childlessness, or a cross.
Trials and misfortunes endured with Christ-love diminish the suffering of others. It prevents them from multiplying like a pestilence. Any dissolution of the marriage bond wrecks another home and spoils another heart. Not only does the faithful spouse perfect his own soul, but he absorbs the agony of another, as Christ took on the sins and infidelities of mankind. Life is made less rough for others by localizing marital infections, and thus preventing them from becoming epidemics.
Those who understand not the Cross call on others to help them make their boredom less boring. What these unspirited lives seek on the outside, the Christian through the Holy Spirit of Love finds on the inside. God gives a curing without destroying, an illumination without burning, a making tender without touchiness. Even in the midst of little crosses, the Spirit makes life be seen not as a "road out," but simply "closed for repairs." An officer in the last World War, after being wounded, made the offering of the wounds to Christ, and then said to his friend: "A piece of the Infinite is under construction!"
What makes life tragic is not so much what happens, but rather how we react to what happens. No one can prevent suffering and infidelity, but he can prevent himself from being soured by them. Our Lord never promised that His followers would be without a cross. Rather did He promise they would have one. He did guarantee, however, that we would never be overcome by it. Love of Christ will not kill pain, but it will diminish it. All suffering becomes bearable if there is someone we love. Sacrifice is pain with love; pain is sacrifice without love. The mother suffers for her children, but it is sweet because she loves. Battlefields, hospitals and homes are filled with thousands and thousands of cases of wasted pain. It is wasted because those who sweat and groan under life's crosses have no one to love, or for whom they can bear the pain. The Christ love on the Cross can make even the worst of marriages bearable, and certainly extinguish any desire to contract a second while the first spouse is living. Religions without a cross will satisfy when romance blooms, but when life becomes sordid and dull and hard, it takes faith with a cross in it to salvage the mind and bring peace.
Because the Christian marriage is the fleshly symbol of the Divine Espousals of Christ and His Bride the Church, no infidelity or unworthiness can justify the breaking of the bond for the sake of contracting a new marriage. Separation may be allowed; but, even then, the faithful one must be redemptive of the other. Faithfulness to the bond is here not to be interpreted as a passive resignation to a duty. It is not the nature of love ever to abandon the one in moral need, any more than it is the nature of a mother's love to abandon a child with polio. There may be a case here and there of a mother leaving her sick child at another's doorstep, but this is only because there is a failing of love. Likewise in marriage, the wife who contracts a new marriage because her husband "ran off with another woman," does so only because love in her heart became contaminated. The soldiers who desert their country's cause in the heat of battle do not display patriotism, but a diseased cowardice.
The "believing wife" or the "believing husband," whichever the case may be, refuses entreaties to another marriage (while the spouse is living) not for the negative reason, "The Church will not allow me," but for the positive reason, because "I love in a Christian way." Each refusal is a deepening of the first love! Fidelity in crisis is therefore not something one "puts up with" or "makes the best of"; it is something that is ardently chosen for love's sake. Homer had a better understanding of this than the modern pagans. Penelope, during the absence of her husband, was courted by many admirers. Each day she worked on a tapestry to keep her hands busy, while her heart awaited his return from the wars. The years rolled on, and though she was told her husband would never return, she still believed he would. Her faith was not based on his charm, but on the original gift of her love and his. She told her suitors she would marry when she finished her tapestry, but each night she would undo the stitches she knitted during the day, until Ulysses returned.
It is a false idea of liberty to think that it promises a release from love in order to please oneself. No person in all the world is made happier by the breaking of a pledged love. There are certain things that once accepted are never to be surrendered. Food is one of them in the lower order. What is forcibly ejected from the stomach has a mark of vileness and impurity. But it is pure compared to a love that is vomited from the heart. Hell is full of hearts which took back their love. As breathing in the same air the lungs exhaled is slow poison, so the lover who draws back into his heart the love he gave in marriage suffers a spiritual thrombosis, which is eternally disastrous.
Since marital love is the shadow cast on earth by the love of Christ for His Church, then it must have Christ's redemptive quality. As Christ delivered Himself up for His Spouse, so there will be some wives and some husbands who will deliver themselves up to Golgotha for the sake of their spouses. The young suitor does not abandon his beloved because she falls in the mud. Why then, when there is moral dirt into which she tumbles, should the husband claim that love does not demand the rescue? There is not a child who was ever born who did not introduce suffering into love. The coming into being of a new love is heralded by the labor of the mother, but the pain soon passes into joy. Our Lord uses this analogy to suggest that every pain nobly born can bring joy into the soul, even the spiritual "labor" of a husband bringing forth a wife unto conversion, or a wife bringing forth a husband to sobriety after a long period of spiritual parturition. "A woman in childbirth feels distress, because now her time has come; but when she has borne her child, she does not remember the distress any longer, so glad is she that a man has been born into the world. So it is with you, you are distressed now; but one day I will see you again, and then your hearts will be glad; and your gladness will be one which nobody can take away from you." (John 16:21, 22)
This mystery of the Cross before the crown, the egotist cannot understand, and for that reason did St. Paul call it "the Folly of the Cross." But those who have sounded its depths know that God gives the strength to carry it! As one non-Catholic woman wrote to the other: "I decided to get a divorce from my alcoholic husband. Then, suddenly, I realized that by doing so, I was making a contribution to the disintegration of civilization. So I resolved to stay with him and be faithful to him. But I cannot do it alone, nor without the Faith. How can I get it?" Her sorrow was turned into joy. At her first Communion she said: "I feel as if I presided at the Creation of the world, before the mountains and the hills were made, and only this morning I caught up with My Lover." Her husband gave up drinking, and the two of them now meet the Love in Communion which makes their twain a Trinity. How the love of Christ works miracles with human love is best told by those in whom the miracles were worked. Some stories of those who have spiritualized love to assure its perpetuity are told in the next chapter.
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