Introduction: The Great Journey

This week we begin posting chapters from our book, one chapter every other week. We begin at the beginning, with our introduction.

A love that is weak or infirm, incapable of accepting marriage as a challenge to be taken up and fought for, reborn, renewed and reinvented until death, cannot sustain a great commitment.

Pope Francis I Amoris Letitia

When engaged couples approach Catholic priests about getting married, many priests have taken to asking them why they want to get married in the Church. When couples explain that they love each other, or that they want to be together forever, the priests explain that that’s no reason to be married in the Church. A secular marriage would do quite well. Bishop Robert Barron has written that couples are ready to marry in the Church when they realize that “marriage is, as much as the priesthood of a priest, a vocation, a sacred calling.”

All over the world, Catholic parishes offer pre-Cana counseling, workshops or classes that are required of couples before they get married. The Church wants to make sure that these young couples understand what they are getting into: not just a lifelong commitment to companionship come hell or high water, but a new kind of relationship with God.

When couples come together and sacramentally vow “I marry you” to one another, they initiate a process that the Church teaches is both spiritually profound, objectively real, and life-long. Falling out of love, treating one another badly, adultery, divorce--none of these end a valid sacramental marriage.

But they do produce very real suffering. Marriage can be a heaven or a hell, but most often it is a purgatory, a process through which we have an opportunity to become better and better versions of ourselves by taking advantage of the opportunities that marriage offers, and overcoming the obstacles it inevitably sets before us.

Married life is often compared to a path or journey we undertake. In his encyclical Amoris Laetitia, for example, Pope Francis calls marriage “a dynamic path to personal development and fulfillment” and John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley that in both marriages and journeys “the certain way to be wrong is to think that you control it.” The journey metaphor is attractive because many of its meanings resonate strongly with couples making that journey. A journey is not its destination but an action; it is people moving forward toward a destination. A journey has uphill struggles that test our strength and ability to work as a team, obstacles like fallen trees and rock slide calamities that we overcome (or that bury us), and sometimes, hopefully often, smooth roads we traverse happily side by side.

This book looks at marriage as a journey toward heaven. We take as our organizing model Dante's great poem about a journey from Hell through Purgatory into Heaven. Dante finds himself in the middle of his life lost in a great, dark wood, hounded by three beasts representing his inclinations to sin. As he seeks to find his way he is given a guide, the poet Virgil, and a vision of unselfish love he names Beatrice. But to find his way to grace and redemption, he must first plunge into the depths of Hell and confront the consequences of destructive behavior. Only then can he ascend the mountain of Purgatory and then travel through the layers of heaven to reach his vision, and the source of love itself.

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