The Hope of the Marital Mustard Seed
theophilus October 30th, 2007
My wife and I are two months away from our 10th Anniversary.
We love each other – it’s that plain and simple. We have thankfully never questioned our marital future – we’ve never doubted that we will grow old together.
But our generation has been conditioned to believe that marriage is antiquated and that marital unions are bound to be short-term. That there will come a time when we’ll have “irreconcilable differences” or ”grow apart”, but we’ll still remain the “best of friends.” This attitude has led to a ridiculously high divorce rate in the U.S. (and that’s even if Hollywood marriages are taken out of the statistics).
But are times a changin’?
We got married on New Year’s Eve (which, by the way, was one heck of a party). In the days before our wedding, we realized that we had been to a insane number of weddings in 1997 and had an insane number of weddings on our calendar for 1998. So, we had a special dance at our reception where we asked every couple who had gotten married in 1997 or were engaged to be married in 1998 to take the dance floor.
The dance floor was packed!
And out of all of those couples (all now going on 9-10 years of marriage), I cannot think of one divorce. I look at our (rather large) wedding party and most of us are going on 8-20 years of marriage - and not one divorce among us.
While I realize this sample is small and unrepresentative, I do believe there is a shift in attitudes, beliefs and expectations among our generation. We’ve looked at the damage caused by broken homes and part-time (or non-existent) parents. And we don’t want to relive past mistakes.
We’re doing a better job at waiting so we can maturely pick a life partner - at realizing that our #1 familial responsibility to God is to serve our spouse and our children, not ourselves - at working through difficulties and not giving up. In our marriages, failure is not an option.
Tuesday’s reading (Rom 8:18-25) and gospel (Luke 13:18-21) pose an interesting perspective that relates to marriage.
In Romans 8, St. Paul sets forth that “Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.”
In Luke 13, Christ gives a different spin on the parable of the mustard seed, “What is the Kingdom of God like? To what can I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that a man took and planted in the garden. When it was fully grown, it became a large bush and the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches.”
A successful and long-term marriage is all about the hope that we cannot see and is akin to planting a mustard seed that grows into a large tree. My wife and I are sitting on 10 years – hopefully we have a good 40-45 years left in us. Wow, what a long time! It’s such a long time that we have to hope in what we cannot see – the next 40-45 years of our life together.
We also have to realize that, while 10 years ago we planted the seeds of our marriage, we are just now starting to see the tree get some bulk to its trunk, some stability to its roots, and some flush to its foliage. The tree is growing and will develop into something grand – if we don’t do something stupid – like forget to water it or cut it down.
And that’s what too many couples do. They can’t see the hope of the future and can only see the sacrifice of the moment. They end up forgetting to water the tree or they prematurely cut it down.
In our marriages, we have to look at our spouse and trust in God that this person is the one he intended for us – out of all of his other children. That from the moment we each were formed in the womb, God intended for us to be together – to love one another.
With this perspective, we can hope in what we cannot see – we can hold on during the difficult and dry moments of every marriage – we can watch as the tree grows into something majestic – we can love our life partner through every joy and hardship.
And we can know deep within our hearts that failure cannot be an option and success is our’s – if we just love and have faith in God, our spouse and ourselves.
Painting: “Forest” - Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
- Faith , God's Call , Jesus , Liturgy , Marriage , Sacrifice
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