As we make our way through the winter season, feeling the weariness of chilly days but also the light that increases day by day, we pause each February to mark Valentine’s Day and to celebrate love.
As Catholics, we can contribute to this recognition of the importance of love by emphasizing its natural consequences and fruits: commitment, marriage and an openness to new life. By seeing with the light of Christ, we can come to recognize how appropriate it is to respond to winter weariness by celebrating the hope and fruits of true love and marriage as Jesus teaches.
National Marriage Week, celebrated annually each February since 1996, recognizes the gift that husbands and wives offer the world through their marriages and provides resources for couples to strengthen their marriages throughout the year at MarriageWeek.org. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “For Your Marriage” initiative also provides comprehensive resources for married couples, those who are dating or engaged, and parents and families at ForYourMarriage.org.
The Christian knows that, just as the virtue of hope is a confident trust in God’s promises and orients us to God as the author of real happiness, so too does true love orient the person to the practice of charity, intimate, and tender friendship, and hospitality that characterize happy marriages and families.
Any Catholic who has been alive and attentive over the past generation or more will recall hearing of the importance of the New Evangelization for the sake of the Gospel. Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have each proclaimed the importance of evangelization in their own ways. When we speak of evangelizing the world, of sharing the hope of Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Life, we are saying that each of us is called by God and through his grace to the sacraments and to sanctification.
The Church understands a sacrament as an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace. Whatever our vocation, and whatever our state in life, God calls us to sanctity and to union with him through the Church’s sacramental life.
Certainly, Christian marital love is sacramental by its nature. Man and woman, united in Christian marriage as husband and wife, are invited each day to allow God into their hearts, into their homes, and into their sacramental unity as one flesh to give special testimony to the joy and hope that flow from relationship with Our Lord. True love is not commercial, but sacramental. True love, whether in marriage or simple friendship, always orients persons beyond themselves and toward God.
As all married couples can tell you, married love brings joys and sorrows, blessings and crosses. When married couples persevere and love one another in good times and bad, they become powerful signs of the Lord’s love, a love that never ends. May we join together in thanking God for all married couples whose faithful witness and imitation of Our Lord’s selfless and sacrificial love encourages us all.
As Christian spouses know from nearly the first moments of their marriage, the consequences of original sin and the temptations of the evil one ever threaten to pull us away from the happiness and hope that God wants for us. These temptations are sometimes quite obvious, and at other times very subtle. We owe one another earnest and fervent prayers for faithfulness and steadfastness and for the courage, when we fail to keep God’s commandments, to return to God and by his grace to begin anew.
No matter our present state in life, and with particular pastoral tenderness for those experiencing difficulties in this season of their lives or who carry the cross of abandonment, abuse, divorce, or infertility, we can find hope in God’s abundant love and his will for our perfection and sanctity. Every day brings with it new opportunities to practice true love in our encounter with others, to be outward signs of God’s love and channels of his grace for others.
As powerful a sign as committed marital love is, the greatness of every marriage simply points to the greatness of a husband and wife’s confident hope and prayerful trust in God. As believers, called to live as one body and one spirit in Jesus Christ, may we join together in prayer for one another to open ourselves ever more fully to God’s grace and to the practice of true love in all our relationships.
