ON PRAYER | Fr. Roch Kereszty

Look for little ways to show your wife you love her

Could anything or anyone be more closely connected to you for good or for bad than your wife? Whose critique puts you down more than hers? Whose praise lifts your mood higher than hers?

You may look like a perfectly self-confident leader but she could deflate your self-confidence in no time should she choose to do so.

God knows that the relationship with your wife is the most tender spot of your soul, and so it is through your marital relationship that He most often wakes you up, saves you and would like even to make a saint out of you.

At the beginning of their marriage not too many newly-weds think of the grace of the sacrament they gave to each other because they are very confident that their love will conquer any obstacle. By now, however, most of you who are married have encountered hurdles, perhaps even crises, and have begun to discover the effective help of God’s grace.

In this short piece I would like to reflect on the immense potentiality of the grace you received in the sacrament of matrimony and offer a few simple suggestions about how you can work with this grace in order to deepen your relationship. I start with a text of St. Paul on marriage and the mystery of the love between Christ and the Church.

“Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21). This mutual subjection follows from the perfect equality of husband and wife and makes clear that any domination of the woman by the man is the result of the Fall (Gen 3:16) and is overcome to the extent that the spouses live and act in the love of Christ.

It is true that Paul says later that wives be subordinate to their husbands, but then he addresses the husbands in these words: “Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word that he might present to himself the church in splendor…” (5: 25-26).

Thus, for Paul the headship of the man should show itself in self-giving love which not only imitates but shares in the love by which Christ sacrificed himself for the Church.

The love which unites Christ and the Church is infinitely more real than the greatest human love and so intense that the saints who have experienced it on earth begged for the cooling of its fire lest they die. Christ’s pledge for a share in this love is imparted to the couples in this sacrament.

As long as they are in the state of sanctifying grace and ask for it with trust, they can always count on their love to be rekindled by the love from Christ. If both spouses believe the words of Jesus, “everything is possible to the one who believes” (Mk 9:23), they will always find in the sacrament an inexhaustible source of energy, patience and love.