Seasoned Love for Catholic couples

By Deacon Ed Sheffer, Director of Youth Ministry at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish 

Love will soon be celebrated and over 150 million Valentine’s Day cards will be exchanged: a reminder to us of the deep need in our human heart to be loved and to love. But love is only a word until someone comes and brings it meaning. 

My wife, Anne Marie, and I have been married for 39 years. We dated an additional five years before that. As I think back to over four decades ago, when we first met at a TGI Fridays Restaurant, I really knew very little about love. What I have come to realize is that marriage is the natural reality of human life. We are drawn to one another to escape loneliness, and our hope is to find our hearts desire in the sacrament of marriage. 

I’ve come to understand that marriage involves more than a mere love relationship. Marriage is to be an intimate union, but for this deep intimate union to unfold, there needs to be true connectedness to God. Anne Marie and I needed to let God love us, so we could love ourselves in a necessary, affirming way. It was then that we could begin to seek to love one another as God loves. It was then that we started to desire more and more what is the greatest good possible for the other. 

Our vows as husband and wife are our unified yes to God to join us together. We promised each other in a beautiful way our willingness to mutually support one another and help bear each other’s crosses. The choice to love intimately got tricky for us at times. This was especially true when we weren’t willing to sacrifice. 

“I love you” doesn’t mean “I will love you if you meet my needs.” That’s hardly love at all. However, love does mean we serve one another. To do that well meant we both needed to explore the other as a person, discovering what makes them happy and content, knowing what makes them sad, or even irritable. Guess what happened when we did this: we realized we were not the same. Two people, a man and a woman, not the same? Shocking, right?! 

1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.” The greatest expression of God’s love for us is the gift of life. The journey toward love begins with being allowed to come into the world, but it doesn’t end there. Love is indeed rooted in God. The gift of love is receiving God’s very nature too. As you might recall, the ‘God’s very nature’ part got a little distorted in the Garden of Eden. In order that we don’t get lost in the pursuit of distorted love, a rescue plan was devised by God: Jesus was sent. In Him rests the potential to become more fully one with that love again.  

When there is no God-plan for marriage, the default plan becomes seeking self-gratification, experimentation, and then pursuing the thing that you think is going to make you happy today. Despite the freedom one thinks this brings, without oneness with God’s love, one’s soul is destroyed. The realization of God’s love and responding to that love is what preserves the soul. 

Twists and turns in life, career, marriage, family, and ministry have provided both challenges and blessings to us. We now know that when God is not first and foremost present in all aspects of our marriage, seeking one’s own pleasure is the result. The value of being made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27) is replaced with having. The ‘who we are’ becomes infinitely less important and ‘what I have’ becomes everything. What a person has only provides an external freedom and, contrary to God’s plan, things we claim don’t define life and or marriage. The much more important internal freedom offered by God comes from knowing that I exist because of God’s love and then choosing to enter into relationship with God. 

No one can give what they have not been given first; God created us for love. First to be loved by Him and then for us to love from that love. But that plan is seriously under attack. Satan’s playbook hasn’t really changed since Adam and Eve back in the Garden. His plan has always been to raise doubt on what love really is and then begin to question how trustworthy it is. The old bait and switch: distract from love by placing things that become the focus and purpose of your life. The further one gets distanced from what real love is, one begins to doubt its real value. Take away God’s purpose for marriage and it’s easier and easier to define it in my own terms. Doubt the love of God and it’s easy to doubt His gift of me to the other. And when we allow the love of God to die in our hearts, trust in God dies too. As a result, it becomes easier and easier for trust in each other to die as well. 

God has given Anne Marie and I more than we expected. This becomes even more apparent when we are willing to let go of control and surrender to Him. It’s not so surprising to us now; it is the things we are unwilling to surrender that bring us the greatest fears and anxiety in our lives and marriage. 

Anne Marie and I have placed a Crucifix in every room in our home. These Crucifixes are our constant visual reminder of what we said yes to all those years ago. They are a constant reminder that Jesus gets to define the love in our marriage. There have been challenges over the years and we haven’t gotten to pick most of the crosses we have had to carry, but God’s promise of grace continues. Trusting in that grace is essential and Jesus continues to provide us the example of love that we need to strive and model. The love, parenting, housekeeping, work, and worry of marriage and family become one with God through the sacramental grace we receive. 

I thank God that my Valentine surrendered herself and became my wife. It has made all the difference in my life. We have journeyed through much and I have grown ever more in love with her over the past four decades. It is the result of a true intimate relationship with Jesus that we have one with each other. And, as a result, I believe I understand love on a much deeper level than that boy who was captivated by that blue-eyed beauty 44 years ago. It is in Jesus that we found the noble purpose in our love and marriage. We are each other’s gift from God, and we are striving to lead each other back to God. Love endures all things.