"There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known." How would you behave if you knew that everything you did will eventually be exposed? The money you secretly withdrew from savings to gamble. The time you vented to a colleague about all the things you don't like about your spouse. The credit card your spouse doesn't know about. The hidden cache of pornography. The group chat where you and your siblings made jokes about your partners. I

"Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give." We have written a lot in this blog about marriage as a vocation, that is marriage as a spiritual discipline lived out in the daily give-and-take between spouses and before God. We offer many posts exploring research on these topics, and providing tools for building stronger relationships in our vocations. We have spent less time writing about an equally vital aspect of sacramental marriage: it is a mission. We a

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the wedding of a young couple we had mentored. In his homily the priest referred to the growth of mutual intimacy between the couple: "The two become one flesh." The following Sunday was Trinity Sunday, and our parish priest, drawing on the Catechism, made the analogy of the Christian family as “a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (CCC 2205). It was with this in mind that

Mark learned early that honesty could be dangerous. Growing up in a home where his father's anger was unpredictable, he became skilled at telling people what they wanted to hear. White lies. Half-truths. Omissions. Outright lies. It was a survival strategy, and for years it worked. He brought it into our marriage. When Dawna asked whether she looked nice, whether he remembered a phone call, whether he had finished the leftovers, Mark gave her the answer most likely to keep th

"We are called to love. Marriage gives you an other to love deeply, to practice all the Christian virtues on: patience, kindness... if nothing else, your spouse will almost certainly be the only person you actually get to forgive seventy time seven." Mark delivers some version of this line every year when he delivers the talk on the sacrament of marriage to catechumens prepare to enter the Church during the Office of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) sessions. It gets a l